Connor Chung

Trade measures a cornerstone to the success of global regulation to curb plastic pollution Plastics, across its lifecycle, is a globalized, interconnected market, so a lack of strong trade provisions would limit the effectiveness of the objectives of the proposed binding agreement.

As negotiations for a global plastics treaty continue, some questions have arisen over whether/how this agreement should take trade into account.

Our piece on why the globalized and interconnected nature of monomer & polymer markets make trade provisions a necessity: ieefa.org/resources/tr...

Oil producers face profit squeeze amid shifting policy landscape • A recent survey reveals a dark mood in the fossil fuel sector, as tariff talk shakes industry confidence • Amid weak margins and rising costs, fossil fuel producers are facing a profit squeeze • The...

Tariffs are shaking energy markets. Some thoughts on what this means — and why this is only *part* of the fossil fuel sector's problems today

ieefa.org/resources/oi...

Remarkable comments from fossil fuel producers in the Dallas Fed's energy sector survey:

(www.dallasfed.org/research/sur...)

So BP's in the news for walking back its climate commitments — and it's not exactly surprising. Here's what I wrote back in October, as the company telegraphed its rollback...

ieefa.org/resources/bp...

(the short version: fossil fuel companies' problems are bigger than politics alone, so politics alone won't be enough to get them back on the right track)

Fossil fuels’ problems run deeper than politics Dan Cohn and Connor Chung are energy finance analysts at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis   As the fossil fuel industry continues to underperform investor expectations, it is ...

Climate action is facing political opposition around the world. So is this a saving grace for the traditional energy sector?

My thoughts today in the @financialtimes.com's @sustainableviews.bsky.social:

www.sustainableviews.com/fossil-fuels...

Thanks for sharing! Glad you found our work interesting :)

Thanks Dave!!

Thanks for sharing our work! Glad you found it interesting.

In wake of the invasion of Ukraine/emergence from Covid, fossil fuel companies turned in a few high-performing quarters.

Going into 2024, they told investors that the good times were here to stay.

So how has it worked out? My latest for IEEFA:

ieefa.org/resources/an...

‘Unfettered’ Gas Exports Would Harm U.S. Economy, Energy Secretary Warns Jennifer Granholm said a new analysis showed that the continued pace of exports was “neither sustainable nor advisable.”

Every energy source has trade-offs/nuances, and the DOE has a lot of perspectives to consider when determining what's in the public interest. But to end with Sec. Granholm’s point: uncritical embrace of unfettered export growth is hardly a good way to go about this.
www.nytimes.com/2024/12/16/c...

So why does this matter? The US — and world’s — LNG export capacity is poised to surge even more dramatically in the coming years. Policymakers need the tools to understand what impacts this might have.

It’s sometimes claimed that LNG expansion is unequivocally necessary for global energy security. But here, too, the report paints a nuanced picture. LNG is “unlikely to be the most cost-competitive source of energy for many countries”, while demand uncertainties cloud its overseas market outlook:

Second, re the economic case: the report provides further evidence that expansion of exports puts upward pressure on domestic prices, increasing costs for households and industry. This too is hardly a surprise: ieefa.org/resources/us...

LNG is not displacing coal in China's power mix Liquefied natural gas (LNG) is often pitched as a transition fuel that can help countries reduce coal usage. However, evidence from China, the world’s largest coal consumer, shows that LNG is unlikely...

This aligns with some of IEEFA’s past research finding little evidence to support the idea that LNG is seriously displacing coal in key markets like China. ieefa.org/resources/ln...

In none of the scenarios, it turns out, do new LNG exports meaningfully decrease emissions. By competing with low-carbon energy and enabling new demand, exports raise global GHGs vs baseline across a range of conditions.

First, re the climate case: LNG advocates claim that it reduces emissions by displacing coal. The report notes that this can be true — but that it does the opposite if it crowds out renewables or nuclear. So how do these countervailing forces interact in practice?

The study is finally out. First, a note on what it isn’t: global energy markets are uncertain, so it doesn’t purport to be a forecast. Rather, it seeks to test what LNG exports look like under different ranges of policy/market conditions. And across scenarios, some big picture conclusions emerge…

The unlikely coalition behind Biden’s liquefied natural gas pivot Climate activists led the charge against LNG exports, but they’re not the only ones celebrating Biden’s pause.

In light of this mismatch, the DOE announced that it was pausing new approval while it brought its toolkit up to date. Pundits framed the pause as a concession to climate hawks — but many industrial interests, too, celebrated the move. grist.org/energy/biden... (h/t @zteirstein.bsky.social et al)

First, why was the study necessary? In the past decade, the US has gone from exporting basically no LNG to being the world’s top exporter, and the structure of LNG markets has changed dramatically. Many of the tools used to evaluate LNG’s economic/climate/other impacts were increasingly out of date.

So the DOE’s long-awaited LNG export study is out. Some things that stood out to me on first read… (1/n)

www.energy.gov/sites/defaul...

Ooh fun will read. I’d come across the concept in Latour and so on, but was fascinating to me to see it in the mouth of modeling practitioners back then

Reminds me of a fascinating internal volume I once came across in IEA archives about the ways GHG/energy system modeling reflects the assumptions and mindsets of the modelers (and how that can be good, so long as we're conscious of it)... from 1997.

(PDF) Why Petroleum Did Not Save the Whales PDF | Ironically, even though fossil fuels provided substitutes for the main uses of whale oil, the rise of fossil fuel use in the nineteenth century... | Find, read and cite all the research you need...

And a classic case of how demand-side factors alone didn't drive a shift from whaling; indeed, cheaper fossil fuels initially made whaling more efficient than ever (a reminder that demand-side substitution isn't as predictable a process as we might presume)

www.researchgate.net/publication/...

World wars and the age of oil: Exploring directionality in deep energy transitions This paper explores the role of the world wars in 20th century energy transitions, focusing on the growth of oil as a major energy source which accele…

Looking back further, a great read on how markets had to soak up expanded oil capacity after WWII (spurring further proliferation of automotivity, petchem, etc): www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

(anyways thanks for this exchange, I always learn a lot reading your work)

Risks mount as World Energy Outlook confirms LNG supply glut looms The International Energy Agency (IEA)’s World Energy Outlook 2024 confirms IEEFA’s analysis that global liquefied natural gas (LNG) markets are barrelling towards an unprecedented supply glut.

I'd suggest that uncritical expansion into a potential supply glut risks inducing new demand, injecting more uncertainty into markets, etc
ieefa.org/resources/ri...

Global LNG Outlook 2024-2028 IEEFA expects global LNG supply capacity to rise to 666.5 MTPA by the end of 2028, which could be sufficient to meet all global demand requirements through 2040, even under optimistic industry forecas...

And I share your concern that overly low ff prices can be bad for the transition. But this, I’d argue, is itself is a good pragmatic reason why the LNG buildout shouldn’t be placed beyond reproach. As export capacity grows dramatically amidst weakening demand…
ieefa.org/resources/gl...

… and that the supply-side approach to fossil fuel production which the piece dismisses has some striking parallels to how I see you all thinking through the potential consumer impacts of LNG in these subsequent convos. (We agreed on the big picture that reductions in volatility are good)

Had a fun conversation w/ your colleague over on the Bad Place about some of this stuff. Made my case that the reasons why folks (environmentalists, yes, but also industry voices) sought the LNG ban were perhaps a bit more nuanced than what was acknowledged in his op-ed…

x.com/ArnabDatta32...