Experts in the News

“For all of the pressure to paint the oil and gas businesses as riding off into the sunset,” fellow Michelle Michot Foss said of the fossil fuel investment boom, “the fact of the matter is that replacing these commodities will be exceedingly painful.”

“China’s been ready and willing to invest in places where the U.S., European, even the Canadian, Australian companies haven’t gone,” said Michelle Michot Foss, a fellow at the Baker Center for Energy Studies who’s researched China’s growing hold over nickel.

2022 has brought another round of the same bad energy policy ideas, write Center for Energy Studies fellow Michelle Michot Foss and Lucian Pugliaresi in a recent commentary. Their simple solution to ongoing energy woes? Support the domestic oil and gas industry.
 

Seasonal factors are in part behind the decline in gas prices, said Michelle Michot Foss, fellow in energy, minerals and materials. "Prices tend to fall starting about mid-summer anyway," she said. She also explained that falling crude oil prices play a part: "Whatever you pay per barrel of oil plus a dollar and change to push it through a refinery is what you'll see at the gasoline pump."

“If ERCOT is struggling to keep the lights on this week, that doesn’t bode well for summer,” Baker institute faculty scholar Daniel Cohan said. And despite state lawmakers’ recent legislation to address February’s outages, Cohan said there's little it can do now to better prepare the state’s energy infrastructure for the sweltering heat to come. “It’s too late to do a whole lot for this summer,” he said. Still, energy fellow Michelle Michot Foss said Texas’ grid is better prepared for summer heat than extreme cold. “We deal with [heat] more often,” she said.