Peaks and Valleys in the Energy Transition

Guest

Arjun Murti

Partner, Veriten

Transcript

Arjun Murti: Once you lose the investors and the appetite to get behind any notion of growth, I think the ability to think long-term is very challenged. Investors are saying, “you wasted my money last decade. Don’t do it again.” And for a lot of investors, I would not call them ideologues about we’re going to have peak demand or not, or that we absolutely have to deal with carbon or not. I think they’re just saying, “we don’t know.”

Jason Bordoff: The global energy landscape is shifting right now. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, debates about peak oil, and waning support for climate action in some parts of the world. These issues are challenging long-held assumptions about the pace and scale of the energy transition. Confronting these complex challenges requires an understanding of the forces that drive energy markets and prices.
So where is global energy consumption headed? Are reports of oil’s demise exaggerated? And as countries prioritize energy security and economic growth, what does pragmatism really mean for the clean energy transition?
This is Columbia Energy Exchange, a weekly podcast from the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. I’m Jason Bordoff. Today on the show, Arjun Murti.
Arjun’s a longtime friend and advisory board member here at the Center on Global Energy Policy. Arjun spent over two decades as an oil and gas analyst, including many years at Goldman Sachs. He came out of retirement to work with Veriten, an energy research and investment firm. He publishes Super-Spiked, a Substack newsletter and podcast about the energy transition.
Arjun joined me on June 24th to discuss current Middle East tensions and their impact on oil prices, his skeptical view of peak oil demand forecasts, and what he calls the era of super volatility in energy markets. We discussed whether US shale production is about to peak, the potential for another oil supercycle, and Arjun’s perspective on calls for energy pragmatism. We also discussed the retreat of some in the oil and gas industry from net zero commitments and what realistic climate policy might look like going forward.
I hope you enjoy the conversation.
Arjun Murti, longtime friend, advisory board member here at the Center on Global Energy Policy. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you and I’m glad we could do it with some other people listening too. Welcome back to Columbia Energy Exchange.

Arjun Murti: Jason, it’s always a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me again.

Jason Bordoff: There’s so much to talk about. We usually talk for up to an hour. I suspect we could talk for several hours. I want to talk to you about sort of news of the day and then just more broadly kind of where we are in energy policy, energy transition. You’ve been writing and speaking really thoughtfully about a lot of these things, but let’s start with the news of the day for a moment. What’s happening in the Middle East and what it means for oil markets — bearing in mind things can change quickly. It seems like you had a modest runup in oil prices and then there seems to be a sense now that Iran has taken a somewhat face-saving deescalatory, not particularly severe response to the attack on Fordo and other sites there. And everyone kind of in the oil market feels like this is behind them and prices are selling off. Is that a fair description of what you’ve seen in the oil market response?

Arjun Murti: I think it is, and I think there’s been a debate of should the reaction into Israel bombing Iran have been more meaningful and so forth. And of course, Jason, beyond the Israel Iran situation, people were concerned about [unclear] oil balances. Non-OPEC supply is still growing at a healthy clip. There’s an uncertain demand outlook that even if it’s growing, it’s not going at blockbuster rates. And OPEC was bringing some previously held off the market oil back on the market. So the market did add $15 to $20 at the peak for some notion of risk of a supply disruption which didn’t materialize. And now it looks like that probability has been taken to pretty close to zero that we’re going to have any disruption in Iranian supply.

Jason Bordoff: And so this has often been described, this whole scenario playing out, as one of the very significant geopolitical risks that the oil market for years has been concerned about. And as you said in the last two weeks or whenever this started, we saw oil prices go from what, the low sixties up to the mid to touching in high seventies, not triple digits, not $100, $120, $150 a barrel. Were you surprised that oil markets didn’t respond more to the possibility of real conflict in a significant way, Strait of Hormuz, retaliation, all of that stuff?

Arjun Murti: Yes and no. I think to some degree, Jason, you and I are not too different age wise. We would have been in elementary school or something like that during the Arab oil embargo years of the seventies. And I still think that still captures the minds of everyone of what it means to have Middle East disruptions. And while there’s some relevance to that, clearly there’s a lot of oil supply there. We’re not in that kind of world where there was no NYMEX, prices were controlled by a handful of large companies and countries. There wasn’t really the notion of non-OPEC supply. Then it came about as a result of that crisis, that ramp up in the North Sea and Alaska at the time. And of course people recognized, hey, maybe we don’t need to boil or burn oil for power generation. So even the demand side became a little more flexible and new sources of supply were developed.
And so yes, the Middle East is still important, but in my recent issue of Super-Spiked, we went and looked back at the last three major disruptions starting with the Iran-Iraq War, which believe it or not, led to a structural bear market. Now we can say that it was delayed by the advent of that war, took 10% of oil supply off the market, but at the same time demand fell. We took oil out of power generation and that was the period when after a huge ramp up in oil over the previous decade, North Sea Alaska rose and it overwhelmed the impacts from the Iran-Iraq war. We had a structural bear market from what was the most material disruption, Gulf War one, you had a short-term spike. It was more of a range bound market. That’s the kind of market we think we’re in right now. And then Gulf War two, ironically enough, the smallest disruption led to a quintupling of oil prices not because of the disruption that was the BRICS growth and non-OPEC was struggling to keep pace with it. So our major point is underlying oil demand and supply fundamentals matter more than the disruption beyond the short-term headlines. And that certainly I think played out this time as well.

Jason Bordoff: And what do you think caused the market impact this time to be as constrained as it was? Did people just not believe supply could possibly be disrupted? We haven’t seen it for so long or it’s just those fundamentals you think are kind of overwhelming things right now?

Arjun Murti: If we look at Iran specifically, the production’s about three and a half million barrels a day. The exports may be two. We’re in a world where it looks like the rest of OPEC was holding off more than 2 million barrels a day, so we could probably spend an hour and a half debating the exact OPEC spare capacity. But even someone who’s most bullish would say there’s probably at least three or 4 million there from the other countries. You still have places like Guyana, Brazil, some Canadian growth and non-OPEC growing. And while demand growth I think is positive, we’re talking 700,000 to a million barrels a day, not the million and a half plus that might have led to a tighter market. Everyone knows now that most of Iran’s oil supply goes to China and it appears that China did pre-buy a whole bunch of oil that while it’s opaque their inventory data, they most likely were buying oil in advance of a potential disruption over the last couple of years. And so even if China had gotten cut off, I think, and they still import as you know, 12 million barrels a day, quite a bit of oil, I think the market bit, all of that and said, yes, we should worry about contagion, but I think this is going to be manageable even if there is a disruption.

Jason Bordoff: And that’s your kind of near to medium term view of the oil market. Assuming geopolitical risk is behind us on just supply demand balances, inventory levels, you see supply growth exceeding demand growth through the end of this year and next year.

Arjun Murti: Jason coming out of COVID when oil sank to negative values but then started recovering as demand came back and supply had been taken offline due to lower drilling activity and then we went right into Russia, Ukraine and oil went above a hundred, I think as high as 120 briefly, I resisted the language to call it a supercycle. I did not see that. My language has been super volatility, super vol as I shorten it, meaning somewhere between 60 to 80 is your basic oil price. We’re going to test 50 if we have recessions and if there is turmoil or what have you might see 90 or a hundred. But for a very brief period of time, there’s nothing really that I’ve seen that changes that view. And I think, and maybe this will lead us into energy transition, as you know, I pushed back on the idea that we were going to have peak oil demand anytime soon and we could talk about why I think that, but at the same time there’s no evidence we’re having booming GDP growth.
We are having some electric vehicle sale impacts in places like China, LNG trucks ramping. There is some diversification of what we previously only used oil for. At the same time, some of these places are going through economic and demographic challenges. It looks like China’s population has rolled over so we can debate is it transition, is it population, is it something else? But whatever it is, China has been 40% of global oil demand growth over the last 10 to 15 years and that is definitely going to be a much lower number going forward. And so I think oil demand grows, but if it’s only going to be growing half a million to a million barrels a day, something like that, that so far you can meet that with some combination of Saudi UAE, shale, Canada, Brazil and Guyana, which leads again us to more of a range bound market, albeit volatile.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, we’ll come to demand and also the transition issues in a minute, but just another word or two on supply. So yeah, I was going to ask you where you do see that new supply coming from both production increases and also bringing the barrels back, you had called what you saw happening in OPEC possibly “pump for Trump” as I think maybe you and others termed it. How do you look at that now? Do you expect this increased level of barrel return to the market to be continuing for the next couple of months?

Arjun Murti: You know what, I did call it “pump for Trump” with the alternative explanation being that Saudi is mad at Kazakhstan, which I just find absolutely preposterous. Pull up a graph on Bloomberg anywhere I-E-A-I-A of Kazakhstan production. I defy you to identify how any country could be mad at Kazakhstan for bringing on the delayed Tengiz oil project that by the way, Chevron and Exxon brought online, it was delayed, I want to say six or nine months anyway. And yes, they have some notion of a quota, but they’re not actually part of OPEC as we all know. So I did not think it was that. So then why did they bring the barrels back? It did coincide with the change in our administration ahead of a Trump trip to the Middle East. Now

Jason Bordoff: It coincided almost exactly with inauguration day when the macro news was bearish

Arjun Murti: And Trump has been calling for lower oil prices perhaps to offset the impact of tariffs, whatever the reason is. So it seemed like they were in some respects showing some deference to President Trump. And again, ahead of a visit, I’ll say a couple of things that probably perhaps I was too flippant in that exact comment. It did also precede Israel bombing Iran and I’m in no way suggesting, and you are a better expert on this Jason than I am, that somehow Saudi was signaling a willingness to accommodate that. I don’t know, but that’s the other thing. It did precede. It preceded actual risk of disruption. It has not materialized in Iran. I think the other couple of things that have happened is OPEC’s own forecasting group OPEC research, they’ve had a much higher demand forecast on an absolute basis on a growth basis than the other major agency, which is the IEA.
And we’ve seen upward revisions to the IEA coming from places like Africa that is hard to discern their exact demand and they’re also at a point of seasonal increases due to air conditioning demand in the Middle East. So I’d say the OPEC increases in part have come at a seasonally strong time and maybe the levels of demand are better. So in fairness, they might have been doing what they’re saying which was simply meeting market demand because inventories while they’ve built a little bit, are still at generally low levels. And so I do want to give some of those countries maybe a little credit versus my flippant remark of “pump for Trump.” I think the other part, and I think in place of Middle East disruption is whatever people think of President Trump, I think one of his most important speeches has been the commerce over chaos.
And we can debate President Trump separately, but I do think as someone who’s spent time in Saudi UAE and you spent probably more time than I have Jason, it’s not this 1970s version of those countries. They’re trying to modernize by their standards. They’re trying to diversify their economies, they’re trying to be part of the world scene economically speaking. I find ADNOC and Aramco to be two of the most impressive companies I cover and when I go to the region, I find it to be not the Middle East of 50 years ago. And there’s something in that says, how do they ensure we’re going to have good economic growth? And part of it’s ensuring we have adequate oil supplies. So I do want to maybe give them some credit for what they’ve actually done.

Jason Bordoff: And I think the pace of social reform, economic change in places particularly like the kingdom, have been pretty remarkable given what people saw or worried about five or six years ago when there was a lot of uncertainty about how crackdown on religious extremists would be received, increasing taxes, trying to, do people feel like they want to participate actively in the workforce, compete in the labor force or not? Is there a backlash to that for people who travel regularly there? Pretty remarkable change. And I know, also, on where the supply is coming from. Talk a little bit about where we are in this extraordinary transformation in the US position as the largest oil supplier in the world, something like 5 million barrels a day, 2006, seven to 13 and a half or so today. But you see the CEO of Diamondback saying that may be a thing of the past.
Your fellow advisory board member here, Scott Sheffield, has kind of been expressing some skepticism too about the outlook for a while. That’s not new. I mean we kind of had similar stories a decade ago, shale doesn’t work below $90 a barrel and then it turned out it did and the technology just could improve and increase productivity in a way that exceeded concerns about the cost and the quality of the acreage. But are those days behind us now? Technology can’t kind of get us out of that. And does that mean the shale revolution, by which I mean annual growth not maintaining our position is in the rear view mirror.

Arjun Murti: Jason, I think you’ve laid that out really well and I want to address all the points you mentioned. I think first is clearly it’s been miraculous to have gone from importing 12 million barrels a day, a country as recently as 2008 to now being essentially net balanced. We import heavy, we export light, probably another topic area by the way, but on net we are much more balanced from our oil supply demand standpoint, which also you can see in sort of the Middle East turmoil not being as traumatic as I think it might have been 30 or 50 years ago, and you’re correct to highlight that through the entire shale boom, analysts including yours truly have said within two or three years it’s going to roll over. This is going back as far as 2012 and that it needed $80 oil, a hundred dollars oil, and none of that proved true.
It kept growing longer and sort of worked at a lower price. Now a lot of oil was developed at 50 to 60 that with hindsight was unprofitable. The return on capital the last five years of the two thousands was a 0% number. So there was a disconnect for the industry overall, for the industry overall of what companies thought would work and what turned out to be working. You add it all up, you probably needed about $70 oil for sort of the best parts of the shale plays to generate good returns on capital that investors would actually be attracted to receive and would attract them back to the sector. And it varies by company. I think the question is, is all that $70 oil now behind us? And I think that is what I read into some of the Diamondback CEO’s type message. Now it is a massive resource and there is a lot of what we call tier two and tier three shale that today would require 80, 90, a hundred dollars oil that I suspect if we saw those kind of prices, you would see an aggressive effort to develop it. And because most of it’s in Texas and or North Dakota, some of the federal questions of who’s in power, who’s not in power really don’t matter actually maybe whether it’s export or not matters a little bit and you of course played a key role in that issue. But I think the call shale “over” is too dramatic, but it might be where we’re getting to be more price dependent going forward.

Jason Bordoff: And what does that mean looking in the longer term, the medium to long term where part of it is based on price? It does seem like, tell me, part of it is shareholders are, and maybe this connects to some amount of uncertainty about longer term outlook. We’ll come to the transition kind of discussion in a minute. Want to see profits share buybacks, dividends perhaps more than investing huge amounts of capital in new projects. And unlike shale, which is short cycle, other projects can take a very long time to play out. So if you’re right about your demand view, which is demand’s not peaking anytime soon and maybe shale’s growing a couple of hundred thousand barrels a day, but not a million or a million and a half in the spirit of the things you’ve written about for a long time of super cycles, are we headed for another one kind of early in the next decade if growth continues in demand, where’s the supply coming from?

Arjun Murti: And I think that’s exactly right. I think there is risk or the potential depending on where you stand on it, of another oil supercycle and it requires structural demand growth to exceed kind of easy to produce oil, which we’ll just call oil requiring $70 or below. There is almost no appetite on the part of investors for companies to pursue long life projects. It’s only for the first time in my 33 year career basically no one’s really trying. Some of the Aramcos of the world have a few of these kind of things. ADNOC does as well. And

Jason Bordoff: Why is that?

Arjun Murti: None of the— why is that? I think it’s a really tough decade. Last decade, zero profits and the market cap weighting in the sector collapsed from 14% of the S&P to just 3% of very small amount. So once you lose the investors and the appetite to get behind sort of any notion of growth, I think the ability to think long-term is very challenged. Investors are saying, you wasted my money last decade, don’t do it again. And for a lot of investors, I would not call them ideologues about we’re going to have peak demand or not or that we absolutely have to deal with carbon or not. I think they’re just saying we don’t know. There is electric vehicle growth. We can debate the pace of it, but it is definitely happening. China for sure is demographically slowing and they’re having some economic challenges in addition to having an EV ramp that is quite substantial.
And so we’re not sure how this is going to play out. India, is the slope of their demand line going to be as good as China? So far it isn’t, it’s growing, but not like China’s grew. And what is the timing of Southeast Asia and other places? I think there’s just a lot of uncertainty on the demand on the economic side unrelated to anyone’s view of carbon emissions or net zero or any of this kind of stuff at a time so far, we had been able to get oil out of the ground at $70 or below and I think you are probably going to have to see the crisis hit before investors warm back up to it.

Jason Bordoff: And then there’s a time element too because as you said, other than shale, this all takes years and years to play out. So if we continue to see, pick your growth number, 800, 900,000 barrels a day per year of growth and decline rates in existing production and where is that new supply going to come from? When you look around, you mentioned Canada, Brazil, other places before, is that sufficient or does that set you up for a market of much higher prices later this decade?

Arjun Murti: Think about the 2004 to 2014 period where oil went from 20 to well over a hundred and stayed there 2010 to 14 for the first part of that decade. People tried deep water, West Africa, deep water, Brazil, Canada’s oil sands. Some of that stuff got investment and it did grow, but it was really the shale oil revolution, which no one was trying to do as recently as 2009, 2010. That turned out to be sort of the answer and it became the dominant supply growth and as you articulated, worked increasingly at much lower oil prices than most expected at the start of that revolution. And so you really don’t, I think you’re going to try a bunch of different places. My former colleagues at Goldman Sachs still publish what they call their top projects reports. The report started 22 years ago. I used to contribute to it for the first time in the 22 years of that report.
They did not add a single new major oil project this year. There are still some projects coming on that were sanctioned in prior years, but not a single new oil project was started. So I think there is a lot of uncertainty on the health of global GDP. We are far from that 4% plus global GDP environment we had in the two thousands. And if you’re sub 3%, you probably can still get away with sort of the debottleneck and easy oil growth. But can we not aspire to someday again having better global economic growth to lift more people out of poverty and improve living standards for others? And in that environment I think there is the potential to have another oil supercycle.

Jason Bordoff: And that assumes this kind of continued growth. And of course we’ve been talking for several years now about the possibility of peak demand coming around the corner. IEA has called that in oil, gas and coal, none of which has proven true yet as you’ve often pointed out. But when you, and obviously we have an administration here in the US that’s thinking quite differently about climate policy, but when you look at climate policies that are in place around the world or just the pace of innovation and cost declines, we saw according to the IEA, the share of new cars sold last year that was electric was up to a fifth. I mean these are pretty big numbers and they’re growing quickly. We’re in this moment of pragmatism and realism and I kind of want to ask you what you think words like that mean and how big an impact they have on some of the projections people had for the transition to start to hit these S-curve dynamics and start to take off a lot faster than maybe we’ve seen in the last few years?

Arjun Murti: I love the question and I think it all deserves addressing. I’ve pushed back on the idea that the world at large is actually going to prioritize carbon emissions over other objectives. One can conceptually debate whether that should happen or should not happen. What I will say is there’s no hard evidence that anyone anywhere actually puts carbon emissions first. That’s proven over and over and over again most recently in Germany for sure in China, India, all these places. That is not to say though that the world will only want to use traditional coal oil and gas forever because there’s a logic to that as well. So pragmatism to me means what you care most about is that you have economic growth and that you lift your people out of poverty and that they attain better living standards and that everybody wants that. And some places don’t have great government, some do and you can again have separate debates on some of those issues.
But for sure China, India and Southeast Asia, you can say they have the type of government structures that is going to enable their people to rise out of poverty. And 4 billion people right there, four times what I call the lucky 1 billion of us in the US, Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand. When you think about their energy needs, I use the example of India, they currently consume one and a half barrels per person. Europe, which is doing the best of the rich countries is at 10. South Korea is at 22, we’re at 20, Canada’s at 21 and everyone’s sort of somewhere in between. On the rich side, if India were to get to 10 barrels per person and maybe it’s not till 2080 or 2100, who knows that is 45 million barrels a day of oil demand and 44 and a half million barrels a day of oil imports.
There is zero chance India is going to want to import anywhere near that amount of oil. We freaked out at 12, China’s freaked out by the way also at 12 a nd look at all the aggressive push they’ve made into electric vehicles and all of that supply chain and so forth. And I think it’d be really interesting to have a debate about the kind of economic policies initiative put in place simply to become a rich country that is also getting geopolitically secure energy that then isn’t dependent on, I will say Saudi, Russia, Iran, Iraq, but by the way also America and Canada, who’s to say they want to be dependent on us anymore than any of those other countries? So I think India will make a huge push to figure out ways to not be dependent. And this is to me always the argument for non oil and gas technologies.
If you do not have access to low cost resources, you’re going to want to try and figure out the new stuff. It’s what China has done to me, it’s an economic and geopolitical security policy, not a climate policy. And I kind of say it’s somewhat unfortunate, it’s deeply unfortunate that energy sources and energy technologies have gotten wrapped up in this sort of climate versus non climate culture war debate when frankly to me it’s an affordability, reliability and geopolitical secure energy. And the final point I’ll just make is just because something’s cheaper today doesn’t mean you’d prefer it. Maybe a gasoline car is cheaper, but then you’re very dependent on these oil flows and you’ve made the point Jason, which I agree with, which is why you may not be super excited about where your solar panels come from, but once they’re up and running, it is absolutely a domestic resource because the sun is coming down onto you. And that’s not a perfect analogy, gasoline to solar panels. But the point would simply be I think geopolitical security and reliability are going to be the driver of energy source and technology diversification. Then once you really do ramp up, that to me would then be the time to start thinking about what is our outlook for oil demand and so forth. So I think we’re far from that.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, not surprisingly, we’re sort of thinking in very similar ways that I’ve been thinking and writing and speaking about this kind of moment of reset, pragmatism, realism, whatever you want to call it. But if we are in a moment where we’re thinking even once again, I should say this is a return to the past. There’s nothing new about energy security and affordability being kind of the primary driver of energy policy. We in a sense developed a collective complacency that energy security risks were something we didn’t need to worry about anymore. And we’ve been shaken from that given recent events.

Arjun Murti: Jason, let me chime in on one more point on this because, and I think people, to the extent they know my background, pragmatism does not mean everything the other side said is stupid and only my side is good.

Jason Bordoff: That’s also why we get along well.

Arjun Murti: We can say that maybe Germany is not the greatest place to have a super abundance of solar and wind, but India probably is the best. As I can tell, India gets pretty good solar radiation and they don’t have a lot of natural gas and they don’t have a lot of oil. So for them I could see solar plus batteries and coal making more sense. So pragmatism to me means where do you want to put some of the newer stuff and where do you not, let’s not force it everywhere, but let’s figure out where it is going to make sense and who’s it going to make sense for. And I think it was actually within CGEP that someone said this, no one is actually for all of the above. Everybody’s for some of the above. And I would say I am for all of the above, Jason, I absolutely am. And I think but all of the above depending on what makes sense for your region, country and your location.

Jason Bordoff: And so what I hear you saying is security, affordability, reliability, that’s going to be the primary driver and for many countries that may take them in a direction that does mean more clean energy and low carbon solutions. I mean you mentioned China before, the motivation for China to reduce oil imports, electrify huge amounts of transportation, deploy a lot of renewables as well as a lot of coal of course, but local pollution issues perhaps were important in that, but a lot of energy security, how import dependent do they want to be? And domestic economics sort of sounds like you think that’s going to play out in potentially similar ways, but if you’re, as you said in India or Indonesia, whether it takes you in a clean energy direction may or may not be true. And coal’s probably the biggest asterisk around that optimism from a climate standpoint.

Arjun Murti: I think that’s right. I’m personally not a huge fan of the clean term. I think every energy technology has some pros and cons and any number of variables, but to make your point and sort of newer tech versus traditional tech, but we’re going to be largely on the same page there. And part of it’s just the numbers are so staggering. Again, the implied oil or natural gas demand growth, if you again equate it to look at South Korea, I am 56 years old Jason, in 1969 when I was born, South Korea was a poor country consuming one and a half barrels of oil per person. Today they are generally a rich country consuming 22. It is possible within, I’m going to say hopefully half a lifetime if I live long enough that you can go from poor to rich, but they’re a small country. We’re going from these sort of 55, 75, 95 million person countries to billion person scale economies.
And the numbers are just so staggering, which is why I think everything is going to grow. Now to what degree are coal plants today, not the coal plants of 30, 40 or 50 years ago because they better be cleaner coal plants because the world’s going to be burning a lot of that. I actually agree that methane is an issue that I think the natural gas value chain should absolutely take care of in part because you’re simply wasting resource. Even if someone didn’t care about climate or carbon emissions, you’re absolutely wasting resource if you’re letting methane leak into the atmosphere. And I think the new stuff, the appeal is you don’t have to import it. And again, I’m stealing your point, which is the stock and flow and it is flow that disrupts your economy and it is stock that actually enables geopolitical security. So I think there’s going to be a huge premium on how can I be energy independent and that is a lot of the newer stuff. So I don’t think it has to actually get to be lower cost than oil and gas as an example. I think it has to just be frankly close or close enough.

Jason Bordoff: People will increasingly perhaps be willing to pay some premium for energy security. And it is interesting, I just got back as with our India program here at the center from a week on the ground, several meetings in India and the level of concern you hear there about dependence on China for supply chains is equal or greater to what you hear in Washington. So to your point about solar and batteries and there are a lot of new clean energy technologies that would make a lot of sense there. The question of how we think about energy security risk in supply chains versus the flow of imports is something that’s going to be a real important policy issue and challenge to get right for many countries in the years to come.

Arjun Murti: It’s what’s disappointing about the current debate in the US where there seems to be bipartisan support for some notion of reshoring, of having a broad sense of, okay, it is going to be tough for Democrats to ever talk positive about coal. There’s probably maybe wind is going to be the poster child Republicans don’t like, but beyond that there should be a lot of common ground. Yet we still have challenges with permitting. We’re so far from what it would take to be truly independent across these different value chains. I’ll say it’s disappointing. There’s not more pragmatism from both sides on those types of issues.

Jason Bordoff: And I hear you when you say pragmatism, realism for many parts of the world is going to mean prioritizing economic growth. Hear you. When you say you truly are all of the above and push back on categorizations like clean energy, fossil fuels traditional energy. When I use the phrase clean energy, it means it doesn’t, it’s not associated with emitting CO2 when you consume and burn it. And I think the unrestrained emissions of CO2 are a problem we have to address. And I think for me, realism about energy means security and affordability and it also means being realistic that the impacts of climate change are going to be pretty bad. There may be a bar of uncertainty about that, but I guess what I’m wondering is in your framing of that, one of the things that’s concerned me about the shift, I think pragmatism is good. I think realism is good. You can’t get anything done if you’re not pragmatic and realistic, but if pragmatism and realism comes to mean this whole climate thing is just too hard, let’s not worry about it, it’ll all be fine. I’m not sure that’s right either. And I’m just wondering if the way you see this issue takes you to that conclusion.

Arjun Murti: I think probably a few different things. So pragmatism to me in part means why does anyone care what Canada’s carbon emissions are as one example, like the fact that Canada is getting critiqued for having rising emissions when it’s overwhelmingly driven by their oil production, which I will take all day over. The alternatives are for me is, my words, the Middle East countries and Russia, I will take Canada all day. So Canada’s got a small population, it can’t possibly, they’re burning from their gasoline, cars can’t possibly matter to global emissions. That to me is unpragmatic. This idea that the fate of carbon is going to live or die by whether the IRA is retained or repealed. Again I find to just be a preposterous sort of discussion. The fact that the UK is sweating out whether a single new North Sea oil field should get sort of sanctioned or not and whether they’re going to ban electric, excuse me, gasoline cars by 2035, these are just irrelevant discussions.
You could have them locally if you want. That is to me being pragmatic. Pragmatic to me would be why is India not going to follow in China’s coal path? So if it is the carbon piece, we’re specifically worried about what is it that’s going to motivate India to not burn as much coal and I don’t believe it’s going to be carbon emissions and I also don’t think it’s going to be LNG. I think this is a point other scholars at Columbia make and I certainly share it, which is our shale gas switching to coal is not what would be the situation in the rest of the world where the LNG price is equal to the oil price, not a fraction of it. Volatile and expensive. I’ll just say how are we going to motivate India to develop economically? It is not really how are we going to motivate them?
How are they going to be motivated if it is the carbon piece we care about? So I think there’s a large part of the debate that are unhelpful and where is the room for compromise that we should be thinking about? How do we do mining, refined critical minerals processing and all these kinds of industries within our country? If it is the supply chains we care about, we for sure have stricter environmental and labor laws. How does that not count and that might result in higher emissions in our country and let’s separate the production of this stuff, especially oil and gas in the emissions that come from it, from the consumption. So I favor, as you know, much stricter fuel economy standards. I have generally thought the SUV craze is an insane perspective from an economic standpoint. I get the consumer choice aspect to it and that is where the issues are.
They’re on the demand side and thought about blaming consumers, put in policies that affect that side of it and separate out the production side of it. Those to me are examples of pragmatism. I think if the oil and gas industry is going to be pragmatic, it is not pretending that Republicans are going to have a super majority for the rest of time. And so for example, proactively dealing with methane, how do you take advantage of the next four years to put in what are would be from their perspective sensible regulations or self-control, whatever the right word is to deal with that issue that we absolutely should be dealing with.

Jason Bordoff: I think I heard you say two things. I just want to make sure, and I agree with one and I want to ask about the second because I think you distinguished on two vectors. One was do we focus on the supply side or the demand side? And I’ve been skeptical of the effectiveness of the keep it in the ground agenda because if the demand is there, prices will rise to such an extent that either politicians will not find it plausible to let those prices continue and we’ll do things like unleash the SPR or do whatever we can to bring prices down for political reasons or there’s no lack of hydrocarbons in the world, so someone else steps in to produce more in the Gulf or elsewhere. So we need to make demand go down if we want to have this transition happen. But then you also made a point about everything is small in context and I want to ask about that. That applies to the demand side too. The argument the Trump administration has used for things like pulling back the power plant rules that EPA or the fuel economy rules you just said you support is okay, these don’t really matter for climate because it’s a couple of percent of total emissions, but everything is a couple of percent of total emissions. So everything is small in context. That doesn’t mean we don’t need to do all those things.

Arjun Murti: I would actually say the fuel economy argument should be an economic argument. The greatest thing you can have is the most GDP growth relative to a small amount of energy used. And we’ve had a policy in this country of having a stated three to 4% improvement in miles per gallon when the actual improvement over the last 30 years is 0.2 to 0.3. The only time we’ve seen appreciable fuel economy gains was after the seventies oil crisis where we did actually have a big step up and we at least temporarily went to somewhat smaller cars. And so we’ve offset 90% of the fuel economy gains by having increasing vehicle weight, which by the way has been completely bipartisan. So you’ll get these rhetorical debates that Republicans are rebelling and Democrats are foreign and it is just theater. It is absolute theater to each party’s respective basis.
The economic argument is you would rather absolutely use less energy to produce your unit of GDP. And I think that to me is the argument India should be thinking about it is absolutely the argument China is thinking about. I think there’s a lot of risk. India is heading down our SUV craze kind of route and I think I was advising them not from an environmental standpoint, but purely from an economic standpoint and for them geopolitical security as well. Since they don’t have a lot of domestic oil, they should be looking to dramatically improve their fuel efficiency. And I think I’ll say that most environmental issues are positively correlated with the economy. Clean air and clean water are, I’m going to say a hundred percent correlated with being richer. There’s no question that biodiversity and carbon emissions have an inverse correlation and again say I think geopolitical security will be positively correlated with dealing with carbon emissions. And just the final point, and this is going to feel like a total cop out I get it, is that fertility rates are way down. And so while we are still expecting decent population growth over the next 10 to 20 years, by all indications beyond 2050, 2060, the world population is going to start rolling over and I suspect that that’s actually going to be the real carbon solution that you’re actually simply going to have fewer births leading to slower economic growth.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, so I hear you about, again, pragmatism, the focus on economic growth on security that can take many countries to trying to use energy more efficiently, reduce demand, move away from oil imports in the macro scale, what does it actually mean for climate and for emissions? Doesn’t that sort of theory of what pragmatism and realism mean, doesn’t that just take us to a world of a lot of coal for a really long time and you don’t address that without climate policy finance for lower income countries something targeted at that because the security and growth issue alone, there’s no reason people wouldn’t use an enormous amount of coal. Is there?

Arjun Murti: I’ve always thought the worst assumptions in all the net zero forecasts was the coal assumption. So I would concede that while my view is that oil demand is going to grow, I actually see the argument for why it could be wrong on it and we’re going to watch all the signposts to see if I’m being too optimistic on oil demand. And same thing with natural gas. There are alternatives for sure. I think with international, non, we see domestic coal. I don’t understand why those countries are not going to this. To me, for folks who care most about the climate and take the carbon emissions issue very seriously, that to me is the issue. There’s massive quantities of coal in the rest of the world and I find it, I do not understand why they’re not going to be using it. It is beyond my policy expertise to say here’s how they will be motivated to not use it.
It does not seem obvious that nuclear is going to get to be so low cost that that is what you’re going to do. I do have expertise in the natural gas and LNG space and I do not believe LNG is going to be competitive in lieu of thermal power. And then so I think there will be some amount of solar and batteries, but I see it frankly as the add-on. It’s not obvious to me that you can have a 90% grid for a country like any of that solar and batteries. People can probably debate that. You may have a slightly different view of that, but I think it is the number one climate question if that’s the question you’re asking. What would motivate these countries to not use coal? I don’t know the answer to that.

Jason Bordoff: Well, that’s why I think it doesn’t happen by itself. It happens with kind of a focus on trying to deal with the problem coal causes and also a huge amount of equity and issues and historic responsibility issues in terms of where the emissions coming from and how lower income countries feel about it. In your current role job, for some reason you wanted a job, again after retiring, you decided to unretire as you put it. And you work a lot with people in the oil and gas industry and we had a lot of targets and pledges from many of those companies, particularly the bigger household name ones, particularly the Europeans. It seems like many have pulled back on those. I’m wondering what you see happening in the industry now in this moment of pragmatism and realism. Is it just go back to the basics of oil and gas. Are people abandoning whatever plans they had for investing in clean energy, especially if some of the government support like the IRA gets pulled back or is that sort of overstating it?

Arjun Murti: I might [unclear] for one second on your question because almost every corporation, certainly in the western world and to some degree in Asia and other parts had to declare some net zero, either target or ambition. And they all did it and I always found it to be ludicrous. I’ve never thought net zero made sense at a corporate level because especially if you’re not in the energy sector, I never understood how Microsoft or Apple or Amazon, they don’t control the grid. It’s 82% fossil fuels and now it’s going to be 81% fossil fuels. The idea of them are individually net zero already is simply silly accounting and I’m going to be with the climate people on this one, which is there’s a whole bunch of greenwashing going on without any accusing any individual companies or I’ll just call it creative carbon math. Everyone’s got offsets to keep Costa Rica still forested, right?
And sorry, I’m being a little sarcastic about it, but I’ve never thought those promises made sense for anyone. And I’m going to say that it’s going to be net zero never. I think pendulum swing. So right now if we’re quote going to be, well we’re not really free markets with the current administration, but say, we’re free markets and all this kind of stuff and the other one favors a little more. There’s always a swing between a little more free markets and a little more regulation. I think net zero is going to be a moment in time. We had Paris in 2015. We had COVID, we had a couple of things happen during that early 2020s and people came up with these promises that no one, no company in any industry was in a position to meet for the most part. So it is going to be the timing of ramp up of technologies.
The big question is will Chinese low cost electric vehicles be allowed to be exported to the entire rest of the world? It looks like they are going to take decent share of Southeast Asia. So I think we will continue to examine our oil demand trajectories for Southeast Asia as Chinese, low cost EVs, penetrate Thailand, Vietnam, and some of those kind of countries. It seems like they’re less likely to come to the US and Europe though maybe we’ll see if that changes. And so I don’t think net zero as a corporate objective, I personally don’t think it ever made sense. Now, that’s not to say there’s zero responsibility on the part of any of these companies. So if you go to the oil and gas sector, most of them had very specific scope one and scope two targets by 2030. And I think those targets are more or less likely to be achieved, the near zero methane promises by 2030.
Also, I think they’re still on track to pursue those targets and I think they take them seriously. They then all have used the language. It’s a 2050 ambition to net zero. And I think for the oil and gas sector, and I think for all other sectors, anyone who used the word ambition that is going to be fade away and never talked about again and CEOs change and it was the previous person and all that kind of stuff. And I don’t personally think it should ever come back. I think these country targets as well have a lot of challenges when you lump in the supply with the demand side of things. That’s probably a broader question, but I think some of the scope one, scope two kind of targets are going to be met. I think the interesting ones are going to be the tech companies.
And I think energy, I think one of the most interesting things is tech now cares about energy in a way they’ve never had to before. And I will give them credit. They all had the silly promises and they’re all realizing the math is more complicated than they thought originally. And I will say they’re going to care most about having reliable, affordable power. And I think they’ve already crossed a bridge on natural gas and I think coal is going to be a big test and I suspect they won’t pursue coal in the United States, but what are they doing in the rest of the world? And let’s watch that. And so can they be part of the solution to motivating countries like India and other parts of the world to not use coal? I think we’ll see. I’m going to be skeptical that they will be. So again, I will say that these net zero objectives are more than just an oil and gas thing and they made even less sense for the Disneys, Microsofts, Amazons of the world.

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, I hear you with the company specific because most companies don’t have direct control over how the airplanes, their people fly on are powered or the cement that for the next building is made. The system has to change. It’s a systems issue. But to change that system, you need some amount of sense of where you’re going. Goals, targets, policies, limitations, whatever it is. I mean that’s true for pollution generally, right? And so I guess I’m wondering when you say I hear you on net zero, but maybe it’s not net zero, but if we want to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change, maybe it’s not net zero, but it does sort of have to be like CO2 emissions have to fall a lot, however you define that. And that’s sort of been true with the history of environmental issues generally, whether it was DDT pesticides, whether it was SO2 and acid rain, the pendulum swings. We kind of mess things up for a while. We don’t pay enough attention to issues and then the pendulum swings in the other direction and people try to move really fast. They realize there’s a problem they need to solve. And I’m wondering if you think that pendulum swing may be coming back too with the need to bring CO2 emissions down pretty quickly?

Arjun Murti: I’m going to say that I don’t think that’s going to swing back. I think when I see articles like the Bloomberg article that says is a trillion dollars of US spending on climate events and those events are weather events. And we can certainly debate and discuss to what degree a changing climate made those events worse. But we have people moving to Florida, we have people moving directly into the wildfire zones in California to call those climate events. I feel like society’s going in the other direction. So are we going to ban people from moving to the Florida’s hurricane zone? Are we going to take down all the real estate there, which contributes to these large losses. Now maybe the issue of people not being able to get insurance is going to be the issue, but I’m going to call that an insurance industry issue. I don’t view that as a climate change issue. You view that as weather wealth, perhaps some bad underwriting policies, perhaps there are way too many people, way too expensive real estate in these areas more impacted by severe weather. But I think when people see all those articles all tagged as climate change articles, it’s not credible to people. And so when we think about,

Jason Bordoff: Yeah, these events are not caused by climate, but the idea they’re exacerbated, they’re worse than they would otherwise be. There’s a scientific basis for thinking that’s true.

Arjun Murti: And I believe that the climate change advocates overhyped that percentage massively that article, and I’m thinking of one article here, it’s not just this one article gave no indication that the number was anything other than a hundred percent was due to climate change. I know you don’t think that, and I agree there is almost certainly a warming climate is going to make some of these events worse. How much worse? We don’t know. But that juxtaposed against how many people have moved to Florida, specifically to Miami and some of these areas most impacted by hurricanes, how much the infrastructure is built up there, which is now what’s getting destroyed by hurricanes. There’s a whole bunch of societal wealth stuff and migration patterns going on where people are specifically moving to these areas. But then the articles all, we could use some truth in journalism. We could use less ideology in some of these articles and all across the board from executives and from the media and so forth. But I feel like people are burnt out and I do not see the pendulum swinging back that climate change is the equivalent of smog in LA legitimate issue that thank goodness we have CARB gasoline or whatever it is and those kinds of things.

Jason Bordoff: Can I just come back to the question I asked you a moment ago about the oil and gas industry, a sector well and what you see happening there. To what extent are investments in what would be lower carbon technologies still taking place? Have they gotten pulled back? And I’m wondering what you think the industry’s capability is. Imagine a world where the way I was talking a moment ago proves more true in the long term in the next decade, suddenly there’s a collective sense of urgency. We have to decarbonize and the world rallies together and by mid-century we’ve dramatically reduced emissions. Maybe not zero, but a lot. So we’ve deployed a lot of clean energy solutions at a scale that seems almost unimaginable today. The oil and gas companies of today, are they some of the leaders in that clean energy economy or is this just a skillset they don’t have and they’re going to producing oil and gas as long as they have, but they’re never going to be the ones that are going to be the most successful at all the range of low carbon solutions that one might talk about.

Arjun Murti: Someone who studies specifically the energy sector, mostly oil and gas companies as well as industry more broadly. I’m very skeptical that the leaders of yesterday’s technology are somehow going to be the leaders of tomorrow’s technology or in the language of the 2021 to 2023 era that they somehow have to be and that they need to be partners in all this kind of language. I always pushed back on that, as you know, and I’ve always thought, these are the worst examples. Why does anyone want to save ExxonMobil and Chevron or for any other company for that matter? I always thought it was kind of funny that the climate activists felt they needed to save these companies by tying them to quote, transitioning into new technologies. But in all seriousness, investors are skeptical that a Permian producer can go to the Eagle Ford Shale. Nobody wants that. Nobody wants any of these shale guys to go look in Algeria or Nigeria for oil.
So there’s not even an appetite to go to another geography in their own business. And as we all know, from 2010 to 2020, they’re in no profits. A 0% return on capital employed, which you don’t have to be a financial analyst to know that that’s a terrible number. So the idea that they were somehow going to be the leaders and they need to get their own house in order. And so I’ve always resisted the need that they have to. Now, should they do nothing? I think it’s going to be company by company. I will say some of the larger companies, I know the US ones a little bit better here. I think what ExxonMobil and Chevron are doing, and they have kind of slightly different strategies, Chevron’s is more of a venture capital strategy. Exxon does have, they both have now direct lithium extraction that they’re looking at.
Exxon’s got some battery and other businesses, I actually like what they’re doing as examples of business that they will say fit their skill sets. The profit potential is unknown, but sure, so is the profit potential of exploration offshore various countries as well. And so I actually think they are taking pretty sensible approaches to what are logical business extensions for us. I think Total in Europe’s a great example of a company that has integrated gas and power. And for them, they weren’t in shale. They do have expertise in a whole bunch of countries where natural gas but also solar are going to make sense. And they figured out a way to blend these businesses together. And that was always a profits driven business and always a business expansion driven business. To me, this is my interpretation, it was never driven in their case by some net zero promise that they did or did not make.
And to me, that is what will make these businesses successful. And I think in that respect, companies like BYD and Xiaomi and so forth in China deserve some credit. And we can debate how much the government helped them or didn’t help them, but by all accounts, they have cars that people want to buy. I would like to buy one or at least drive one. I currently drive a Tesla. I enjoy driving it. And so I think there is going to be a role for, I mean, look at how it is Tesla that dominates US electric vehicle sales. It was not the legacy companies that do it, and they’re still nowhere to be found, for the most part. It has generally been new companies. My example classically is Netflix was tried to be taken over by Blockbuster. They said, no, thank goodness none of us would have streaming if that had happened. So Microsoft’s one of the few companies to transition from DOS and Windows to now cloud infrastructure and AI and so forth. They’re a rare example of a company that has successfully transitioned within their business.

Jason Bordoff: So this idea, we’ve heard for many years that oil and gas companies will become energy companies and with a transition be producing low carbon energies. I hear you expressing skepticism about that for two reasons. One is you think it’s unlikely we get to a place where the world isn’t using a huge amount of oil and gas as much as now or close to it or more. And second, even if that does happen that oil and gas falls off a cliff. These are not the companies that you think are going to be the leaders and the alternatives to those things.

Arjun Murti: Partly the market is saying this right now, the market is saying we are unsure about the outlook for especially oil demand. I think they’re more optimistic now on natural gas demand and we want you to just return the cash to shareholders and we will then use that cash to figure out who is the next Tesla or who’s the next Vista or whatever. Vistra, whatever. The attractive green nova has been a great stock, as an example, power infrastructure, even Siemens Energy has had a great rebound here. So investors are saying, we’ll take that cash. We don’t want you to go figure out power infrastructure or some other thing. We will figure it out ourselves. And I think if oil demand started declining rapidly tomorrow, people would encourage the companies to simply liquidate and no one should miss them. Do you miss Sears Roebuck? Are you like, ah, man, I really wish I could go to Sears Roebuck. Nobody misses these companies that die. It’s part of nature. No one and nothing has to last forever, certainly in the corporate world.

Jason Bordoff: So for people who are deeply concerned about climate change, what do you think is reasonable? It sounds like the idea of just stop investing oil and gas and do something else is not, probably not something you agree with. What is reasonable to expect of, if anything, of the oil and gas industry for people who think it’s really important that we try to make emissions go down much faster than we are today?

Arjun Murti: I think the two areas the oil and gas industry is most directly responsible for and can address would be the methane issue where there is both technology that is sufficiently low cost to deal with the vast preponderance of methane that is either vented or leaked into the atmosphere. That is an issue that I have supported. I recognize and think they should deal with it. And I think the issue here is the larger companies are on track to deal with it. These tend to be the companies that get yelled at by activists and it’s frankly the much larger swath of small companies who have a very important voice that comes out in places like the API and so forth, the industry regulatory bodies that frankly is where the schism is, if any. I think all large companies frankly support the IRA for that matter as well as some of the methane reduction goals that have been espoused by climate activists and the Biden administration and so forth.
It is actually a large small company issue there I support dealing with methane. I think the other issue is orphan wells. I think that is one that legally, as I understand it doesn’t apply to current companies. I mean that’s kind of the nature of it that orphan wells from companies long ago deceased. But I view that as an industry blight and one that industry should figure out what is the right solution to clean it up. But those would be to me, the two most meaningful areas. And I actually think, Jason, that is it. And then I think if oil demand goes away because I am not sufficiently pessimistic on China and I’m too optimistic on India and Southeast Asia, then these companies can and will go away if the demand goes away. I don’t personally believe they have greater responsibility than that when it comes to specifically carbon emissions, which you asked about.

Jason Bordoff: Arjun Murti, thank you so much for making time to be with me today. As always fascinating to talk with you and for all you’ve contributed to the work here we do at the Center on Global Energy Policy, our advisory board, our conversations, which we try to take seriously, the idea that it’s really important to engage with all ideas including and perhaps especially those with which one might disagree, but do it in a substantive evidence-based, respectful way. And that’s why I always really enjoy spending time with you and learning from you and challenging my thinking and really appreciate the chance to talk today.

Arjun Murti: Jason. The feelings are mutual and it is why I love being engaged with the center. Even my own discussion on things like why solar does make sense in places like India as a complement most likely to coal comes from being involved with the center and recognizing things that it is not just about only using LNG or gas and why some of these newer technologies make sense. So I appreciate all the engagement. It does evolve my own views and I thank you for your friendship and your partnership.

Jason Bordoff: Arjun, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you again, Arjun Murti, and thanks to all of you for listening to this week’s episode of Columbia Energy Exchange. The show is brought to you by the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. The show is hosted by me, Jason Bordoff and by Bill Loveless. The show is produced by Mary Catherine O’Connor from Latitude Studios. Additional support from Caroline Pitman and Kyu Lee, Sean Marquand engineered the show. For more information about the podcast or the Center on Global Energy policy, please visit us online energypolicy.columbia.edu or follow us on social media [at]Columbia U Energy. And please, if you feel inclined, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, it really does help us out. Thanks again for listening. We’ll see you next week.

The global energy landscape is shifting right now. Geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, debates about peak oil demand, and waning support for climate action in some parts of the world are challenging long-held assumptions about the pace and scale of the energy transition.

Confronting these complex challenges requires an understanding of the forces that drive energy markets and prices.

So where is global energy consumption headed? Are reports of oil’s demise exaggerated? And as countries prioritize energy security and economic growth, what does “pragmatism” really mean for the energy transition?

This week, Jason Bordoff speaks with Arjun Murti about the state of global energy markets and of the energy transition.

Arjun is a partner with Veriten, an energy research and investment firm. He also publishes the Super-Spiked newsletter. Previously, Arjun served as co-director of Americas equity research for Goldman Sachs. Prior to that, he was a buy-side equity research analyst at J.P. Morgan Investment Management. He also serves on the Center on Global Energy Policy advisory board.

Morningside Campus Status Updates

By Topics

By Regions

By Type

Initiatives

Programs

Partnerships

About

MIssion

People

By Topics

By Regions

By Type

Initiatives

Programs

Partnerships

Guest

Transcript

More Episodes

Relevant Publications

Sign Up Today

Subscribe now

Relevant
Publications