Energy’s Digital Future: A Discussion with Amy Myers Jaffe

EKT Interactive

Thanks for listening to the CRG Channel on the EKT Interactive Oil and Gas Podcast Network.

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Commodity Research Group (CRG) is an independent research consultancy specializing in base and precious metals, as well energy products. The Group provides research and general price analysis for these markets, along with advice to companies seeking to construct hedging strategies.

In this podcast, oil market expert Andrew Lebow talks with author Amy Jaffe about her new book, Energy’s Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security.

The book is available now at Amazon and Barns & Noble websites.

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About the Experts

Amy Myers Jaffe

Amy Myers Jaffe is Research Professor and Managing Director of the Climate Policy Lab. She was formerly the David M. Rubenstein Senior Fellow for Energy and the Environment and Director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations.

A leading expert on global energy policy and sustainability, Jaffe previously served as senior advisor for sustainability at the Office of the Chief Investment Officer at the University of California, Regents and as executive director for energy and sustainability at University of California, Davis where she led research on low or zero carbon fuels and transportation policy. Jaffe has taught energy policy, business, and sustainability courses at Rice University, University of California, Davis, and Yale University. Jaffe is widely published, including as co-author of Oil, Dollars, Debt and Crises: The Global Curse of Black Gold, with Mahmoud El-Gamal.

Her book Energy’s Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security will be published by Columbia University Press in 2021.

She is chair of the steering committee of the Women in Energy Initiative at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy policy.

A frequent media commentator, Jaffe serves on the leadership council of the U.S. Association of Energy Economics and holds a Senior Fellow award from that organization for her career contributions to the field of energy economics.

Jaffe is a member of the Global Future Council on Net Zero Transition at the World Economic Forum (Davos).

Andrew Lebow

Andrew Lebow has been involved in the energy derivative area since 1980. He began his career with Shearson Lehman Brothers where he worked in the initial formulation and marketing of the NYMEX WTI crude contract in 1983 as well as the NYMEX gasoline contract in 1985.

Mr. Lebow has appeared before the State Government of Alaska as well as the State Department of Defense to discuss hedging techniques. Mr. Lebow is also well known as a market analyst and is quoted frequently in the financial press. He has appeared on television on CNBC, NBC, CNN, CBS, and PBS. Mr. Lebow holds a BA from Lafayette College and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

James Colburn

Jim Colburn is a futures and options professional with 30 years of wide ranging experience in commodity markets. For much of his career, at Man Financial (1989-2011) and Jefferies LLC (2012-2013), Mr. Colburn worked with major integrated oil companies, hedge funds, pension funds and other entities to develop market hedging and trading strategies.

He has conducted trading, hedging and risk management workshops in energy markets worldwide.

Mr. Colburn is a published author on options trading, hedging, market making and risk management. In 1986, while at the New York Mercantile Exchange, Mr. Colburn helped develop new markets in energy option contracts by educating the oil industry, banks, floor traders and brokers, worldwide.

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Transcription

Andy Lebow: Hi, this is Andy Lebow of Commodity Research Group. We are thrilled to have as our guest today on the podcast one of the real stars of the energy field, Amy Jaffe. Amy is currently a research professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. During her long distinguished career in both the public and private sectors. She has become known as a leading expert on global energy policy, energy sustainability, and geopolitics. Amy has a new book out entitled Energy’s Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security, available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Amy, thanks so much for joining us and congratulations on the book.

Amy Jaffe: Great to be here with you, Andy.

Andy Lebow: Amy, I love the book. Any book that could take you on a journey from Henry Ford to Elon Musk is well worth the trip. I have to tell you, for anyone who’s interested in where we were, where we are, and where we’re going in the energy space, I would really urge you to read this book. Amy, you focused on a number of themes in the book. You talk about energy innovation, energy transition, and the geopolitical consequences of the new digital energy world. And we’re going to talk about all these themes during the podcast. But let’s start in the past. In the book you describe a real opportunity missed at the dawn of the gasoline age. Tell us about the incredibly interesting and really little known story of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford.

Amy Jaffe: Well, I think the people don’t really know. I mean, people know that Edison, Ford were incredible innovators and inventors at the last turn of the century. And indeed, was a very transformative period. And Henry Ford developed this assembly line process that revolutionized manufacturing. Edison was responsible for basically our entire electricity system. But the interesting thing is that they collaborated to try to pull together an electric battery that would be suitable for automobiles and for the Model T. And at the time it was a really interesting thing because we all think about this narrative that we’ve been told that gasoline was the superior technology and that’s why we’re all in gasoline cars. But that wasn’t actually true at the time of Ford and Edison.

At the time of Ford and Edison, actually the way people got all across big cities in the United States was by electric vehicle. And indeed, there were these very efficient electric taxi services. Sounds a little bit like Uber, where you would call the taxi company on your telephone and they would come and pick you up in an electric car. And then when the battery would get low, the driver would go back to the central depot and they would switch out the battery for one that was charged.

So realistically, the entire transportation vehicle fleet back in the day was electric 1910, peak electricity for cars. And then on top of that, we had electric trolleys. We had electric trolleys and major cities. And so electrification of transportation, which we’re now talking about like this unbelievably difficult task we’re going to undertake. We were electrified. So people say, “Well, gasoline was just so much more efficient.” But actually gasoline cars were unbelievably problematic.

When you hear the expression people use today, that someone is cranky. That comes from the fact that used to have to crank your gasoline car to turn it on. And it was so hard to do that people would literally break their arms from the kickback and other problems with the car. And there were all kinds of problems. There didn’t use to be safe gasoline stations. You used to actually pick up gasoline at the grocery store.

And so there were stories from back in the day of people literally blowing themselves up trying to fill their own car with gasoline. So it was really a pretty imperfect technology. And of course, there’s a famous story where Henry Ford wanted to promote his car, so he wanted to get the famous environmentalist, James Burrow to drive the car. So Burrow took possession of the car and tried to drive it and actually crashed into his barn.

So they were not easy. And then people would drive out with these cars, these gasoline cars, and the axle of the car would break from bumps on the road. And so they’d be stranded. So it really was not a superior technology at the time when the Model T first came out. And indeed, not only did Ford and Edison try to come up with an electric vehicle, but years later, Henry Ford was quoted as saying that he regretted that his cars ran on gasoline, that that was going to be a major problem for vehicles in the future, and that he wanted to see his car shift to some other fuel because he designed the car to be a vehicle for people in the rural countryside. So it was clear how many … thousands of electric car companies, including the Baker electric car, that service people in cities.

So Henry Ford’s idea was that out in the countryside in America where electricity was still not prevalent, he would create a car that ran on biofuels. And eventually he was convinced to switch to gasoline. But the bottom line is even the first Model T’s were dual fuel vehicles. So to me, it’s very instructive to go back and look at that period of history. What happened to the Ford, Edison collaboration on batteries?

Well, one of the problems was that the whole battery industry was torn asunder during World War I because so many of the metals involved in battery manufacturing were needed for ammunition and other military supplies. So, that was a big factor in hindering the continued competition of electric cars with gasoline vehicles. And the second thing that happened is that the US government requisitioned Henry Ford and others who were manufacturing vehicles to supply trucks for the effort of our allies in Europe, because Germany in World War I controlled the rail lines, the logistics.

And so the allies needed to switch to trucking to be able to have a leg up. And America supplied ambulances, supplied trucks. And Ford switched some of his manufacturing to provide support for airline jet plane manufacturing. So, it was really a crucial period in history where the national security imperative of the war pushed us out of electric cars.

And there’s a little bit of a tragedy in that because now when you hear people from the current tech industry talking about developing autonomous self-driving robot cars that are going to be able to deliver food without human beings and are going to be able to serve as taxis in Manhattan and they could be electrified and that’ll be less polluting and better for air quality and that’ll be no carbon emissions, and it will be a better society. The sad thing is, had we not gone to gasoline vehicles, had we stayed on the taxi system that we had, say in New York City, where they were electric and we still had electric trolleys, then the transition to clean electricity would have been a snap. And all the infrastructure we would have had for vehicles and a light rail would still be electrified.

Andy Lebow: That is an unbelievable, just an amazing story because I don’t think many of us, I mean, I’ve been in energy my whole career, and I had no idea that the electric vehicle was so advanced in the 1910s and into and into the 1920s. And here we are, literally a hundred years later talking almost daily about electric vehicles. And I think this will lead into our next-

Amy Jaffe: And let me just make one last point, which is, can you imagine how good the batteries would have been if we’d spent this last hundred years perfecting them instead of perfecting the gasoline engine?

Andy Lebow: Oh yeah. We’d be there. Right? We would be there.

Amy Jaffe: We would have been there a long time ago. [crosstalk]

Andy Lebow: We would’ve probably been there in the 1950s. Yeah. Who knows?

Amy Jaffe: Who knows.

Andy Lebow: Yeah. But unfortunately, 25 years after World War I, we had World War II. Who knows if the electric vehicle would have been effective fighting World War II. We won’t know, but it is an amazing story. And I think it does segue into, let’s move into today and tomorrow, because a lot of the book is about energy innovation. And we certainly live in a world where a technology is remarkable. It’s changing the way we live today and will do so tomorrow. And one of the areas where technology has had an enormous impact is in the energy field, of course. And your book is entitled Energy’s Digital Future. Can you talk a little bit about some of those developing and developed digital technologies and perhaps how you see them hastening, or maybe even hindering the energy transition?

Amy Jaffe: Well, let’s talk about it. I mean, I think one of the interesting things that we’ve seen is that the COVID pandemic actually accelerated some of the technologies I talked about. So for example, commuting accounts for about 16% of US oil demand, historically. And pre COVID, less than 10% of US employees use the telecommuting. But now something like a third of the country are working from home. Another portion of people are working from home sometimes. So that’s a big change. And if you think about longer term, you add to that the fact that business airline travel is down 70 or 80% from what we were used to. That’s a lot of consumers of oil that are no longer out there for those specific purposes.

Now, some of the things are more complicated. E-commerce. E-commerce is also way up since COVID. It grew 44% in 2020. And here’s the thing. People have studied it, and if you demand immediate delivery, maybe not so much, but if you’re just ordering something on an e-commerce site and they’re delivering it to you, whether it’s a big, efficient purveyor, like an Amazon, and you’re not going to the store for those items. They’re coming to your house. UPS, Amazon, the shippers, they have these digital E programs, where they use an algorithm to figure out what is the most efficient way to get that package to your house.

And the first year that UPS used one of these big data programs to schedule deliveries. So it both schedules what warehouse to deliver from, it schedules how many packages go on what truck, it even schedules what turns the driver makes. Drivers are not allowed to just randomly go where they feel like going to deliver these packages. It’s all computerized and linked into their navigation system. And the first year that UPS did that, they saved a hundred million miles. I’m sorry, a hundred million miles. Yeah, a hundred million miles of vehicle mile travel, just this algorithm alone.

So again, very powerful way to eliminate oil use, very powerful way to reduce emissions. Amazon and some of the companies are saying they’re going to go to a low carbon vehicles, maybe hydrogen or for big trucks, or electricity for delivery tracks based on renewable energy. So we do something like that, huge, powerful effects on environmental performance. Both for local air quality, but also for carbon emissions. So very powerful technologies.

And of course the big one we all learned about during COVID was 3D printing. So you might recall that we didn’t have enough PPE during the initial stages of the crisis and you had companies donate the time of their 3D printers in Houston and other cities to quickly make masks and other things that people needed using 3D printing. Now, 3D printing is widely used now in the aerospace industry. And it has a huge effect in the following way.
Take an average plane. I use the example of this [inaudible]. You used to have something like 800 or 900 parts that went into that engine. Now they 3D print it. Eight parts. Now, why does that matter for environment? When people say, “Well 3D printing uses more electricity,” and that’s true, but, and there’s the but, if you have 800 or 900 parts being manufactured for an engine and you have a complex supply chain and those parts are being manufactured in different places, you have to ship them to the factory that’s going to assemble the engine. And that takes a lot of oil.

Academics have studied that and they say, again, just shifting to 3D printing can reduce oil transportation use for goods by up to 30%. So a lot of these technologies have really powerful applications, but it’s how you use it. If you’re jumping into an Uber all the time because you don’t want to park your own car, or maybe you’re a person who lives in a city, you don’t even have a car. Sadly, what the research had shown prior to the crisis was that a lot of people were taking Uber instead of going into the subway. And therefore, that was making things worse. You had all these gasoline cars cruising around, looking for rides, and a lot of congestion, which wastes fuel, as you had all these Uber trips stopping and going, and delivery van stopping and going, a lot of congestion in cities. And so that was making the problem worse. So it’s really about not only the technology itself. I tell people the technology itself is agnostic. It’s how we use the technology, whether it’s going to give us a positive result or a negative result.

Andy Lebow: I want to say that you have been talking about 3D printing I think even before it was even invented. It’s something that I know is very close to your heart and that’s an amazing stat you threw out, because 30% of transport demand, we’re talking about-

Amy Jaffe: It’s big.

Andy Lebow: Yeah. I mean, we’re talking about multiple million barrels a day of global demand. That’s a big number.

Amy Jaffe: [crosstalk] materializes. And the interesting thing is, if you think about the trade war of recent years, companies really have the incentive now to shrink their supply chain. So not having all their supplies come from one part of the world where they have to worry about the pandemic risk, someone might close down factory somewhere and they’ll lose their supplies. And so you’re having this pressure to shorten the supply chain. And indeed, last year in 2020, maritime trade was down almost 5%. So, that’s one thing.

And then the question is, when will it hit the retail? So maybe we’re a little far away from that. But one of the stories I tell in the book is I went to the place where they 3D print Adidas sneakers. And someday you are literally going to be able to print your own sneakers in your house, or you’re going to be able to go to a retail outlet and tell them what you want for a custom sneaker. And they’re going to measure your foot by computer, by taking a picture of your foot, and then they’re going to print out your sneakers.

And I don’t know how to share the image of what this looks like. You’re standing in front of this little machine. It almost looks like a office watercooler or coffee maker, and there’s a little compartment, and it’s open, and then a plastic window shuts over this compartment. And then the guide pushes the button from his computer, which has the design for the base of the sneaker. And I don’t know how to describe it to you. It’s like goop comes out into this window, magically, and three minutes later, it’s the bottom of the sneaker.

Andy Lebow: Come on.

Amy Jaffe: It’s hard to describe it because it’s additive. That’s what they call it, additive manufacturing. So it just piles up the material that you’re going to make the sneaker out of, one little layer at a time. It really looked like we were in a Walt Disney movie, like abracadabra. In Europe and other places, they have experimented with 3D printing homes and buildings. As I said, we’re 3D printing jet engines.

So it’s really just mind blowing to think about what could happen someday. And you could imagine you’d be sitting in your house and you’d say, “Geez, I’m noticing that my seven year old’s sneakers look a little too small now, and you and he or she would just sit down at the computer and you would design the sneaker you want, and then push a button on your home 3D printer, and the sneakers would be there.

Now, here’s the big thing when you’re talking about sustainability. If you print the sneakers and then a week later, you don’t like them and you print another pair and you keep printing and printing and printing sneakers and throwing them away, that would be a bad thing. So again, same thing, double-edged sword here on the 3D printing.

But if you think about American competitiveness, you don’t have to have a hundred people to sell the sneakers together if you’re going to 3D print it. So it’s really going to change the relationship between the global south and industrial countries like the United States, because they’re going to be items, whether that’s industrial items or heavy industrial items, maybe first, but then later retail products that the United States is going to be competitive in again, because we’re going to use these advanced manufacturing techniques and robotics. And they won’t necessarily create the kind of manufacturing jobs we think about from 10 years ago that moved to a China or an India or a Vietnam, but they’re going to create different kinds of jobs. And so it’s hard to even think through how that’s going to change society and how that’s going to change what we do.

Andy Lebow: Well, that leads us really nicely into the next area that I wanted to talk about. And one of the strengths that you bring to your analysis, and is key to why I think this book is so important, is your background in the geopolitical area. You write a lot about how the digital future will challenge geopolitical norms, particularly when it comes to China. There’s a chapter about China in the book, which is really terrific, Amy. Can you elaborate a little bit and talk about how you see the geopolitics playing out in the new digital world?

Amy Jaffe: Well, I think the first thing about the digital world, which we learned what the attack along the pipelines. So Colonial pipeline had moved to automated digital systems, both for billing and for the operation of the pipeline. So in the old days, there literally were human beings who would turn valves on and off to make deliveries from the pipeline. And of course, that’s all automated now, but that increases the surface area where some ransomware attack or some other attack could take place and try to override these automated or digital systems.

So the first thing that’s changed geopolitically is that the country that’s going to be the most powerful in the world is not necessarily going to be the country that has the largest army or the biggest navy per se. But you’re going to have to be superior in this digital cyber space, both on the defensive and the offensive, just to create a new d’etat to discourage people from cyber attacking you.

And then the flip side is, which I go into in the book, how China uses some of these technologies is different than the way these technologies should be used in a democracy. And therefore, the United States really needs to take a leading role, not only in the developing the technologies themselves, because that’s good for the US economy, and good for jobs, and good for our own competitive position economically. But we have to consider to be leading in the world to avoid what the Biden administration has termed as a digital authoritarianism, which is a great way of summarizing it.

So in China, you have the system where, here in America your credit card rating is based on your ability to pay your bills. You get credit initially from having an income and showing that you pay your bills regularly, and then you build up your credit over time. It can be a little difficult for a young person starting out or for a person who starts out with a lower paying job. But ultimately, the system is based on how you pay your bills.

In China it’s a social rating system. So how you pay your bills is part of it, but more importantly, the Chinese look at who are you connected with on social media? What do you do in your daily life? Are you a good citizen in the community where you live? Are you a responsible worker in your job? And they have facial recognition software all over the country. So you can imagine that if you were to go and participate in a protest somewhere, and facial recognition captured you, then your social rating would go down. And if you did other things that the government didn’t like, your social rating would go down.

And so it’s like a control mechanism for repression, and indeed, if the Chinese government decides it doesn’t like what you’re doing, what you’re saying, someday that could be even more frightening because you could be speaking at home if you had Alexa, and you were giving her instructions, she’s taping you, then they’re going to know what you’re even saying in the privacy of your own home/ It gets very 1984ish very quickly. My allusion to the novel.

So the problem is that not only is that a big problem in China where just people’s freedoms are highly repressed by the use of these digital means, and you get on the low social credit rating score in China, you might not be able to buy a house. You might not be able to get a job. The consequences of it are quite severe.

But the flip side is, they’re exporting that technology and know how to other countries that want to be, or are authoritarian, for how they can use it. And the real danger is, honestly, which we’re seeing is, what if some foreign adversary decides that it’s going to put surveillance on Americans, and Americans living abroad, or maybe even Americans in the United States, and they’re going to use that surveillance to do harm to Americans, to try to either suppress their free speech or worse.

I mean, there was a story in the paper a week or two ago about someone who had a hacking glitch. In other words, they weren’t hacked, they had just a software glitch in their Tesla, and it took three hours to get them from being … They were locked in their car by accident and they couldn’t get out of their car, even though they were in the car and they had the ignition. So they were unable to unlock their car.

So you can imagine if we’re, someday soon, going to go to robot taxis, which they’re already using in Arizona, that are going to pick you up. There’s no driver, there’s no steering wheel. You’re just in the back seat of this machine. And it’s digitally programed because you pushed a button in your phone that said you wanted to go to a certain place. Well what if the government of Russia decides they don’t want you to go to that place? We have to know that that won’t happen. And part of knowing that won’t happen is for the United States to stand up and have not only superior technology, and superior encryption, and superior privacy, as superior cyber defense. It’s also about showing the world how these technologies need to be regulated to make them safe for freedom of expression, for our democratic values, and for safety, and for environmental performance.

Andy Lebow: Which is a huge challenge, right? Just a huge challenge.

Amy Jaffe: Well, there are 16 bills this week, or 17 bills, in front of the US Congress today on this subject of privacy and cyber. At least we’re starting to focus on it, but we’re nowhere near a solution.

Andy Lebow: Yeah, finally starting to focus on it. All right. I want to move on to an area that both of are very familiar with. We both came up from not the petroleum area, the less than sunny side of the street. You’ve turned green, Amy. We’re still doing petroleum analysis at CRG. But I know you follow the markets very carefully. And what I wanted to talk about, really, and you talked about it in the book, you write about energy investor dystopia. And I wanted to ask you, what does that mean, particularly vis-a-vis the majors. And I also want to talk about OPEC. And if you were advising OPEC right now, would you tell them to play the short, high price game that they’re playing right now, or concentrate on the longer game and start liquidating their reserves right now, actually. So if you could talk about those two things, that would be great.

Amy Jaffe: Well, so the first thing that I think we’re seeing already is, as investors start thinking about what we call transition risk or climate risk. So I’m going to own stocks and bonds, and let’s say, we’re talking about my pension funds, so I’m not just a day trader, like some of your firm’s clients. Say, I’m just in for the long haul, I’m going to have my portfolio, and I’m going to hold it for 20 or 30 years and have it provide a return. Investors have become concerned about whether or not the different energy companies, do they have a forward looking capital deployment strategy that is such that’s going to continue to yield return over time. And they’re not going to be left with unmonetizeable assets.

So what do I mean by that? Say I was an oil company today and I announced I’m going out tomorrow and I’m going to drill for oil in Alaska. That’s going to be very high cost oil. I have to worry about what permafrost melting would mean for my physical facilities. And it’s going to take me five or 10 years to even start my oil production, will there be demand for it as we move to a de-carbonization pathway?

So, if you’re an investor you might say to yourself, “Geez, I don’t want to be having my money, my pension money, or my long-term investment money in a company that most of his profits, or all of his profits, or some high proportion of its profits are coming from Alaska because I just don’t think that’s going to be a good investment.”

And so what you started to get was the combination effects. First, you got some groups that just said, “Listen, I’m not skilled enough to know what companies are in the Canadian oil sands, which is another very expensive place, or what companies are in the Arctic. So I’m just going to divest from oil and gas companies completely.”

And then you have other investors that are a little more sophisticated and they go to these companies and they say, “Listen, we’re thinking of dumping your stock, but we’d like to know what’s your plan. Are you aligned with the energy transition that scientists are saying we need to make? Do you have a scientific plan for how you’re going to shift your capital over time? And what are you going to do about your legacy assets?”

And as that movement has gained momentum, you’re seeing companies take serious changes to how they invest. And then you’re seeing other companies not take such serious changes and their stock price has gone way down. And so in the complex as a whole, since the Paris accord, and of course gaining some momentum now as the US policy has changed, the percentage that energy companies used to be, in value terms in the S&P 500, was about 10%. It’s maybe a little bit higher in years when energy prices were high.

Now, it’s 3%. And indeed, Exxon lost its place in the Dow industrial average. And they’re now no longer a part of that cluster. And Tesla and Apple and other companies like that have higher market capitalization than Exxon. And so we’re really seeing a changed investment profile. And that raises some questions about whether there’ll be enough capital to continue to fund oil and gas development, or whether the energy transition might be forced by the fact that people stop investing, which we’re seeing somewhat in coal in the United States and might begin to see in coal in other countries over time. Been a lot of announcements this year by banks and other institutions that they’re no longer going to lend money for coal. So we’re really in … That’s part of the energy transition is the transition on the finance side.

Now, what does that mean for OPEC? It hasn’t yet affected how investors see bonds from oil producing countries. But one would imagine that someday it might, depending on the country. And it does cause a conundrum for OPEC, as you described, because if OPEC puts the price very high today, and people say, “Geez, this is crazy. I’m going to get an electric car.” Or, “This is crazy. I’m not going to spend that on gasoline. I’m just going to have Amazon deliver that to my house.”

You start to get to a picture where we know how we would eliminate oil demand, clearly, in ways that are not as inconvenient as they used to be. It may be in ways we might’ve been inclined to do anyway. And so the effect on OPEC of letting its price be high is that you’re going to get a demand correction faster than you might’ve otherwise. So then I asked the question, “Well, geez, does that mean that like OPEC should keep the price low?” We have two problems.

Problem number one is the OPEC countries basically need the money. So that’s uncomfortable to keep the price low. And then the second problem is, to the extent that you’re an OPEC country and you want to take a forward looking view of your own future, you might want to be thinking about how you’re going to pivot your economy to be less dependent on oil revenue. And then having low revenue to reinvest is also a problem. So today would not be an easy time to be a policymaker in a petro state because the choices are very challenging.

Andy Lebow: Amy, you know what? On that note, we have reached the end of our podcast. Again, I want to say that the book is terrific. The name of the book is Energy’s Digital Future by Amy Jaffe. It’s available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble. And of course, Commodity Research Group can be reached on commodityresearchgroup.com, and Jim and I will be having our usual fundamental discussion coming up. Amy, I really can’t thank you enough. This has been a great discussion, and you’ve given our listeners a lot to think about. So again, thank you very much.

Amy Jaffe: Thanks for having me.

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Links:

Commodity Research Group

Commodity Research Group Podcast

EIA.gov

OPEC.org

Contango vs Backwardation

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