Diesel prices in the United States have smashed records, topping $6 per gallon nationally and exceeding $7 on the West Coast, while inventories sit well below five-year averages. Truckers, farmers, freight operators, and industrial users feel it first. The pain is global: European and Asian markets have also hit or approached records as middle-distillate supplies […]
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Europe spent a decade congratulating itself for pushing coal to the edge of the power system. Then it priced itself back onto the fuel it spent political capital destroying. Benchmark Dutch TTF gas prices spiked above €80 per megawatt-hour this month, the highest in three years, after the Iran conflict choked LNG shipments through the […]
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The White House’s decision this week to step back from a blunt 90-day diesel export ban is one of the most important energy-security signals of 2026. Record pump prices invited a political shortcut. The administration, led by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, instead chose the harder and more honest path: keep the refining system running and […]
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The wind industry is approaching a structural inflection point. Early fleets in Europe and the United Kingdom are aging faster than advertised, composite blade waste is outrunning recycling capacity, and decommissioning liabilities are coming due just as subsidy structures change. Two recent posts by Peter Clack capture the twin problems: rapid performance decay well short […]
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Ineos, the chemicals giant owned by Sir Jim Ratcliffe, is idling all three of its world-scale acetyls plants in Hull, northern England. The facilities—Europe’s last remaining plants of their kind—produce essential feedstocks for pharmaceuticals, clothing, cosmetics, detergents, construction materials, and military explosives. Two have already stopped production; the third will follow in days. The site […]
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The National Energy System Operator’s figures put transmission investment at about £64 billion through 2030 and another £89 billion after that—more than £150 billion in all. The Guardian’s mapping of official recommendations points to well over 4,000 miles of new power lines by 2041, plus subsea cables and converter stations to move Scottish and offshore […]
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How a policy sold as climate leadership transferred industrial power, energy security, and emissions to Beijing. David Blackmon put it as bluntly as anyone in energy journalism has: every facet of the West’s net-zero obsession and taxpayer-subsidized “energy transition” is designed, in practice, to benefit one country. That country is China. On September 20, 2026, […]
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With Dr. Tammy Nemeth, David Blackmon and Stu Turley, this was a wild discussion. In this episode of the Energy Realities podcast, host Stu Turley sits down with Kathryn Porter, energy consultant at Watt-Logic, alongside panelists David Blackmon and Dr. Tammy Nemeth to discuss a critical threat to UK energy security: the collapse of the […]
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The green-steel project was sold as the industrial proof of Net Zero: replace coking coal with hydrogen, swap blast furnaces for electric arc furnaces, keep the mills, cut emissions, and lead the world. In Germany, the United Kingdom, and across the EU, that story is colliding with energy prices, missing hydrogen, cheap imported steel, and […]
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However, it only captures part of the story. It does not fully capture system-level costs, weather extremes in places like Germany, consumer price outcomes in the West, or end-of-life realities. Those gaps matter when the claim is that firm renewables are already cheaper than new fossil generation and insulated from fuel shocks. Renewable Wind, Solar, […]
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