From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

I can’t get my breath!

Europe and Britain are going to make a cyclical recovery, while Trump’s America is going to lose

Energy is suddenly becoming much cheaper in the UK and Europe, rapidly narrowing the gap in industrial competitiveness with America and rescuing households with a windfall stimulus as we go into 2026.

The January futures contract for wholesale gas has almost halved since last winter to €27.39 (£24.06) a megawatt hour. The contract is even lower for January 2027, and lower yet for early 2028 and 2029, as traders anticipate the gathering global glut of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Brent crude oil has fallen to the lower end of its historic trading range in real terms. This is unlikely to change as Saudi Arabia floods the market to regain lost global share, and as the US over-drills in a fast-changing world that no longer wants as much crude as big oil likes to tell itself.

The International Energy Agency estimates that global oil supply will rise by 5.7 million barrels a day over this year and next, while demand will rise by 1.6 million. The structural overhang is colossal. It will be even larger if Vladimir Putin is let back into polite society.

The net effect of the twin gluts in gas and oil is a relief package worth some $1.2tn a year for countries that import energy, and a commensurate loss in rents for Opec, Qatar, America, Canada or Norway.

Most of America’s shale gas output has been trapped inside the country – and even within regions of the US – since the fracking revolution reached scale in the early 2010s.

The wholesale cost of gas in Europe in mid-2022 was seven times higher than the Henry Hub price enjoyed by the booming petrochemical belt from Texas to Louisiana, or the Chicago region drawing on the Appalachian Marcellus and Utica basins.

Today it is two and a quarter times higher. The gap will narrow further as the US opens new export terminals for LNG, doubling total capacity by 2029. By then terminal capacity will have risen tenfold in a decade.

Donald Trump has made much of America’s new role as the world’s biggest exporter of LNG, and has been actively forcing the pace. He should be careful what he wishes for. The Henry Hub price of gas in the US has risen by 50pc to $4.11 (£3.08) since August, enough to cause the first stirrings of a cost-of-living revolt.

The full load of hypocritical AEP nonsense here.

AEP has spent years defending Net Zero and in particular claiming that renewable energy is cheaper. He has long maintained that fossil fuels will soon be in rapid decline.

Not only that- he has regularly criticised Trump’s “Drill, Baby Drill policies”. Even now, he makes a fool of himself, stating that the US will lose out! It is only because of Trump, who in particular has lifted Biden’s freeze on new LNG export facilities, that we will able to benefit.

As real energy experts have been predicting for years, gas and oil prices are already returning historical lows, following the Ukraine war price spikes. It is an economic process that has always taken place in energy and raw material markets – demand exceeds supply, and prices rise – this incentivises new investment, increasing supply and lowering prices – this leads to a glut, pushing producers out of the market and starting the cycle over again.

Lower gas prices mean, of course, that renewable energy becomes relatively dearer and Net Zero more expensive.

At this stage, you would expect AEP to admit his mistakes and call for Net Zero to be dropped. Incredibly, he doubles down:

“Falling gas prices give Britain a window to sort out its chronic energy problems. If Labour had sense, it would switch the load of levies on electricity bills to gas bills, raising the percentage gradually each year to give people time to adapt.

It is a policy absurdity that a Government committed to slashing CO2 emissions and electrifying everything should preside over a warped incentive structure that favours fossil fuels, and actively deters people from switching to heat pumps, electric vehicles, or induction cookers powered from what will soon be 80pc home-made clean energy.”

He calls himself an economist!

If one technology/product is better and cheaper than the alternative, you move to the former. What you don’t do is tax the cheaper product and use the revenue to subsidise the expensive one.

He continues with his regular nonsense about Chinese solar panels and wind farms, apparently blissfully unaware of what he has just written about gas prices! And still he lives in the La La land where you can run a modern economy on intermittent wind power and solar farms, which only supply useful amounts of electricity in summer.

He finishes:

“Trump’s America is going to lose in two ways. Its industrial energy advantage will largely disappear and its fossil export revenues will be worth far less than the White House seems to think.

For those of us in Europe, it is a blessed relief. We can lick our wounds after the violent gas shock of the last four years and reduce our dependency before the next fossil cycle does its worst.”

No, Trump’s America won’t lose out. It is in their interest to wean Europe off Russian oil and gas (which they still buy) and stabilise the European economy. America will benefit from exports of oil and gas, which AEP has been arguing for years are stranded assets.

But what the clown still has not worked out is that Europe and the UK are still determined to commit economic suicide, phasing out fossil fuels and pursuing Net Zero.

When we are baking in high, economy wrecking energy prices, we will lose out on all of this cheap fossil fuel energy.

And the rest of the world will be laughing all the way to the bank.