The Energy Company of The Future

Podcast Transcript

Ed Coyne: Hello, and welcome to Sprott Radio. I'm your host, Ed Coyne, senior managing partner at Sprott. I'm pleased to welcome Doug Sandridge, senior vice president at Fulcrum Energy. Doug, thank you for joining me today on Sprott Radio.

Doug Sandridge: What a fantastic treat. I can't wait.

Ed Coyne: Doug, you have over 40 years of experience in petroleum and land management. I'm excited about this because I just finished watching the first season of Landman. I get to talk to a real landman today, which will be fun. I want to start by really unpacking your history and background, both from a personal and professional perspective. Please walk us through how you found yourself in this field and some of the experiences you've gone through over the past four or more decades.

Doug Sandridge: Yes. It's approaching five now. I was looking the other day and noticed that I started my first job in the oil and gas business in August of 1975. That means August of this year will be my 50th anniversary in oil and gas. I was born into the oil and gas industry. My dad graduated from the University of Oklahoma with a degree in geological engineering and had to serve in the army. I was born in an army hospital while he was doing his service. Shortly after that, six weeks after I was born, he got a job in the oil and gas business and worked for Phillips Petroleum for almost 40 years. We started to travel around like the nomads that oil and gas people often are, especially geologists.

I moved, oh gosh, 26 times in my first 26 years of life. We moved around the U.S. quite a bit, Texas, Colorado and Oklahoma. Then, in 1966, my dad got an opportunity to go overseas, Phillips Petroleum, which is a substantial independent oil company now ConocoPhillips. At the time, they were limited in what they did overseas. They weren't a huge international company and made a big play to enter the North Sea. They had one of the iconic discoveries of all time, the Ekofisk discovery in Norway.

After over 200 wells had been drilled in the North Sea and 37 in Norway, I believe, had been drilled all dry holes before they found this iconic field. Phillips really took off because of that. Anyway, as a child, I lived all over the place. When you talk about Landman, ironically, I finished high school in Midland, Texas. After living overseas my whole life, finishing high school in Midland was quite a culture shock. Midland is near and dear to my heart.

There were two main reasons why I went to the University of Oklahoma—well, several reasons. My parents, my mom and dad, both graduated there, and they wanted me to go there. My parents were going to be transferred back overseas, and I'd been in Midland for a couple of years. They thought it made sense for me to go to school near family. I had my grandparents in Oklahoma. That was another good reason.

The third reason I started Oklahoma was, if your parents live overseas, how do you get in-state tuition? If they live in Abu Dhabi, you probably get in-state tuition in Abu Dhabi. My parents wanted me to have in-state tuition, and it turns out at that time in Oklahoma, I don't know if it's the same now, but at that time in Oklahoma, Oklahoma University would grant in-state tuition to anyone whose parents were living overseas and working for an Oklahoma-based company.

Ed Coyne: Interesting.

Doug Sandridge: Since Phillips Petroleum was in Oklahoma, then I got in-state tuition, even though my parents were going to live in England. For those reasons, I went to the University of Oklahoma. I really wanted to be an architect. I just hate to say it, but I looked around and saw all my friends in architecture, and they had no social life at all. It was so much work. It was one of those degrees where you spent all your time working on projects and drawings, and you never could go to parties and do everything.

After my first year as an architecture major, I decided I loved architecture, but I wasn't going to devote my whole life to it and not live the college experience, so I transferred to engineering, which was my dad's dream for me. I had to declare a type of engineering, and I had no idea what I wanted to do, but it sounded neat to declare nuclear engineering. I declared my major in nuclear engineering. Honestly, I had not grown up my whole life thinking, "Oh, I want to be a fireman or a nuclear engineer." It wasn't like that at all.

Then my sophomore year, so in April of my sophomore year, the Three Mile Island accident happened in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. We all know nuclear energy had already been on a downward trajectory for about a decade in the U.S. and Canada already. The release of Jane Fonda's The China Syndrome, followed immediately by the accident Three Mile Island, really were big nails in the coffin of nuclear energy at that time, so I transferred over into oil and gas at that time. I got a degree in petroleum land management, and I spent my entire career doing that.

Ed Coyne: It's amazing you talk about being at the forefront with nuclear. I'm smiling and laughing about that. About a month ago, we interviewed Gabriel Ivory, a senior at Texas A&M studying nuclear engineering. It's amazing how life goes full circle over multiple generations. Nuclear's becoming cool again. People are talking about it again. If you stick around long enough, you get back into vogue. Reading your bio, I thought nuclear was a newer initiative for you because you have so much oil and gas experience. That's fascinating that you studied nuclear engineering in college. That's really cool.

Doug Sandridge: Yes. Honestly, you get out to college. You get a career. You're trying to climb up the corporate ladder. You get a new wife. You get a family. I didn't spend much time thinking about nuclear energy during that period. Really, what got me re-engaged in nuclear energy was Robert Bryce. He has done more for energy education than just about anybody. I listened to his podcast religiously. He and I were friends, but not great friends at that time. Every week, he would do a podcast once a week. When they closed Indian Point, he was so angry.

He did four podcasts in a row, and he called it Indian Point Blackout Week. He was just on a rant for four days about how silly it was to close Indian Point. By the time I finished listening to those four episodes, I was ready to run through a brick wall to save nuclear power plants. I decided at that point, so that would be April or May of 2021, I decided, "Okay, how am I going to get involved?" One of the people that he interviewed was a really interesting fellow named Mark Nelson. I don't know if you know Mark.

Ed Coyne: I don't.

Doug Sandridge: He's a great nuclear engineering advocate here in the US. Great friend of Chris Keefer, your own homegrown nuclear advocate there in Canada. I heard him speak so passionately that I just-- I found him on LinkedIn or Twitter someplace and reached out, and he got me involved. He said, "Okay, if you're serious about this, then I'm going to get you involved with Save Diablo Canyon, Save Palisade." He even invited me to go with him to Berlin to a rally to shame the Germans for shutting down their last nuclear power plant. That's when I got re-engaged in 2021. Indian Point was the point.

Ed Coyne: Diablo Canyon, we've had Heather Hoff on our podcast. I know you know her as well and have worked with her, of course, if you were involved with that. Let's hear from your side of the table. She has a fascinating background, the way she grew up, and how she got involved with that project and just working there. What was your experience of going through that? What did you learn when you were trying to save this plant?

Doug Sandridge: Let's be clear. I was just an appendage on the side. I was learning. I got involved, and the story is California had a rich nuclear history for a long time. Even at the beginning, organizations like Sierra Club and other organizations really supported nuclear energy because they felt like it was so environmentally preferable to the alternatives. Early '60s and early '70s, California was building nuclear power plants. They had test reactors there. They had all sorts of stuff going on.

All of a sudden, the tide turned, Sierra Club decided that us humans were not mature enough to handle the prosperity that was going to be created by abundant nuclear energy, and so they started to oppose nuclear energy. California was one of those states that went all in. By 2013, they'd already closed all of their nuclear power plants except San Onofre and Diablo Canyon. Then 2013, California Edison, they closed San Onofre. Then, under continual pressure from the public and the governor, they announced in 2016, I believe in May of 2016, May or June, sometime in early 2016, they announced they were closing Diablo Canyon.

It was at that time, right before that, Heather and some of her other colleagues had noticed subtle changes at the plant, which gave them kind of confirmed what they already believed, and that was that the plant was not going to relicense for future. They started Mothers for Nuclear. They paired up with Stand Up For Nuclear, Isabelle Boemeke, all these other organizations. It was kind of a hard road. From 2016 to 2018, it was pretty grim because the institutions of California were so anti-nuclear, the governor's office, everybody. When I finally got hooked up with them, I had not done advocacy.

I essentially sat on the sidelines and listened and learned, what is it like to advocate? How do you advocate for something like this? I'd never done grassroots advocacy work. I listened and saw what they were doing and learned. Occasionally, I threw a little money towards it, but honestly, I was just a fly on the wall trying to learn the trade. I did not think that there was any chance that they would save that plan. I just thought in California, they were too dug in in their anti-nuclear position. Of course, there's nothing like a good brownout or blackout to change people's minds.

Ed Coyne: Right. You're anti something until all of a sudden it starts affecting your day-to-day life.

Doug Sandridge: As all the great work that Heather and her partners and Stand Up For Nuclear and Generation Atomic and Isabelle Boemeke, the great work all of them did, I'm not sure that they would've saved it had they not started to have blackouts. They positioned themselves to pounce on that so once that started to happen, then they started to give the politicians the oxygen and the information necessary for them to change their minds.

Eventually, I believe over two thirds of the legislature in California voted to keep Diablo Canyon open. That to me, was a lesson of what grassroots advocacy can do. I'm trying to take that same spirit to doing some advocacy in Colorado and Texas now, but I have to say, I was not a believer at the time. I just thought I was working on a great cause that really didn't have a future, and they proved me wrong. They did such a great job.

Ed Coyne: I want to talk about something that's near and dear to your heart that I guess is a couple of years old now. The oil and gas Executives4nuclear, talking about getting involved. I think that's fascinating because at Sprott, people have been really talking about nuclear in a meaningful way the last couple years, three to five years. This whole thing of the perception is it was oil and gas versus nuclear or oil and gas versus solar, and so forth. The reality is we need it all, and we need it all in different ways, shapes, and forms. We need it all in certain parts of the world, more than other parts of the world, because of access and so forth. Walk us through why oil and gas Executives4nuclear, what's behind that? What's driving that?

Doug Sandridge: Since we've already talked about Heather, she's such a great friend for you guys and for me. In fact, I was just out and had dinner with Heather a couple of weeks before Christmas. I had the great opportunity to go out to Diablo Canyon.

Ed Coyne: Oh, cool.

Doug Sandridge: I met Heather in person for the first time. I had known her on WhatsApp chats and calls for several years. We had talked by phone many times. We were on a phone call. One of the things that Stand Up for Nuclear did is they started a WhatsApp group where they would invite anybody who is interested in advocacy for Diablo Canyon; they would invite them to join this group. It was a way for them to communicate with each other, hear about events, react to calls for action. "Hey, we need to go out to the Capitol today and show our support. We need to call our senators," whatever the case may be.

I joined that WhatsApp group. As I said, I don't want to act like I was really involved. I was involved because I would get on the phone, and I would sit and listen to all that was going on and learn. I rarely said very much, partly because I wasn't in California, partly because I was a neophyte. I didn't know what I was doing. Partly, it wasn't my fight as much as it was a fight for the people of California. I did that for a couple of years, and we'd have our weekly call on Tuesday, but I was also looking for a purpose for my advocacy.

You can listen to the calls, you can go to Berlin, you can do a few things, but I was thinking, what can I do to really impact, move the needle on nuclear advocacy? We're on a phone call, so I'm going to call out Heather, she doesn't remember this, but we're going to call out Heather. For some reason during the phone call, she says, "We know you oil and gas guys hate nuclear energy and we know that your industry undermines our industry and has done so for a long time."

I was like, "I got to take myself off of mute. I can't take that sitting still." I took off mute and I said, "I just have to push back. I think you're wrong. I don't know where that narrative has come from. Maybe that was true in the '50s, maybe it was true in the '60s, but it is certainly not true now." I said, "I don't know anyone in my industry who's anti-nuclear." I said, "Of course, I don't know all 4 million employees in the U.S. but I know a heck of a lot of them. I really believe that the vast majority of oil and gas people support nuclear energy, because I believe oil and gas people are generally sober about energy.

They understand good energy; they understand energy that's not so good. They understand the inherent limitations of certain types of energy. I think oil and gas people can respectfully respect what nuclear energy brings to society, even though it's not our industry. We're big enough, we can stand up and support somebody else's industry." I had that idea. I said, "Maybe this is what I can do to help the advocacy. Maybe one thing I can do to help nuclear is to dispel this myth that oil and gas people are anti-nuclear."

Now, obviously, there's somebody somewhere, and maybe there's an organization somewhere that I'm not aware of, but I just think it's untrue. I mulled on that for a little while. Then I thought, "I think I'm going to do is, I know a lot of people, I'm going to put together a declaration of support for nuclear energy and explain why energy's important, and explain why nuclear energy's important, and explain why oil and gas people are strong enough in their own skin to stand up and support nuclear energy."

Then I thought, "I'm a nobody. What am I doing here? Who's going to listen to me and who's going to sign this thing?" I texted Chris Wright and I told him what I wanted to do. Chris Wright, our new Secretary of Energy. Chris is a busy guy, and he doesn't always call me or text me back immediately. He's on his own schedule. Pretty quickly, within an hour or less, he texted me back and said, "I love this idea. Let's do it." We drafted this declaration for oil and gas Executives4nuclear in support of nuclear energy. At one point, it was as long as six pages. We realized nobody was going to read six pages.

At one point, it was as short as one page, but I didn't think I could say everything I wanted to say in one page. We finally settled on a two-page declaration. Page 1 is all the reasons why energy is important to the world, and page 2 is what we need to do to support nuclear energy. I sent it over to Chris and sent it to his a personal assistant and said, "Would you run this by Chris and see if this is something he would sign?" About an hour later, it came back signed. He didn't change a word in it, he just said, "That's good." He was the first to sign it, and I was the second to sign it, and we were off to the races.

We went out and we've got about 130 or 140 signatures from executives. There are some big names on there. Then there's a lot of not-so-big names, but there's power in numbers as well. I think that it's been an effective tool to raise awareness. I think if nothing else, we have really dispelled among most of the nuclear people we know. We've dispelled the myth that oil and gas people don't support nuclear energy. What I didn't know at the time is how many oil and gas companies are seeking a path into nuclear energy. I didn't realize how important the oil and gas industry is going to be in developing nuclear energy going forward, especially the small and micro actors.

Ed Coyne: Talk about that because the infrastructure of an oil and gas company is really the key. You think about even coal companies. You look at current coal plants and this idea of small module reactors coming in, again, retrofitted to a coal plant and serving the energy needs there. I got to believe that's what's driving a lot of this and saying, "Look, we already have the know-how. We have the geologists, we have the skills. We understand all this. This is just diversifying a portfolio."

It's not just something to do because we think it's the right thing to do. It's also a thing to do that you can profit from and add value to. It can finance itself. It's not some kind of tax credit. It's just being supportive of an initiative or a narrative. It actually works. By signing this, what does it mean when an executive says, "I'm going to put my name on this also"? What does that mean for them or the company they represent?

Doug Sandridge: I think, to be honest, for most of the people who signed it, they didn't sign it for any other reason than I signed it. It was that they thought that we need more energy for the world. The world needs more energy. We, as oil and gas executives, recognize that some of that energy, if not a lot of that energy, should and will come from nuclear energy. I don't think it was any more convoluted than that. Now, there are a few people on that list who actually have an invested interest in nuclear energy. I'll get to that in a minute. I think most people just signed it because they thought it was the right thing to do.

What I had no idea really at the time was how pervasive it is becoming in the oil and gas industry and service companies as well to take an interest in nuclear energy. Now, like you said, now that you think about it, it really makes sense. Now, I don't anticipate you're going to see Exxon building AP 1000s gigawatts scale can-dos or anything like that. That's not going to happen, probably. That's probably different. We've got all these small modular reactors and microreactors, anywhere from 5 megawatts to 300 megawatts in size. Those are of the size that they could probably benefit from the skill sets that these oil and gas companies and oil and gas service companies have.

These oil and gas companies know how to build big projects on time and on budget. They have supply chain competency. They have project management competency. They have research competency. They have manufacturing competency. They have all of these. They can build an offshore drilling rig, or they could build a small modular reactor, probably just as easily. The actual reactor is probably going to come from existing technology, one of these Oklo or X, or somebody, but actually to build the plant, to take it and build the whole project, it's perfect for oil companies and for large service companies like NOV.

I don't know if you guys know NOV, but they're very low-key and low-profile, but they've been around for a long, long, long, long time. I'm guessing over 100 years. They are very well respected, very well managed, and they know how to do bid projects. This comes back to the question of who signed this document and why they did or didn't. I was looking up through my Rolodex trying to find everybody I could that would sign this declaration.

I called a couple of people that I knew at NOV and I said, "Hey, I got this declaration. Would you guys be interested in signing it?" I was miffed because not only did my friends not sign it, but they wouldn't even return my calls or my emails. I'm thinking, "I thought we were friends." As I found out later, as you may know, just a year ago, in January of last year, NOV announced the formation of a wholly-owned subsidiary called Shepherd Power. That company was started up by them as a division to do nothing except develop nuclear projects. I then later found out the reason they didn't sign the declaration is that they thought it'd be dishonest. It'd be self-serving to sign it.

They couldn't tell me that they were developing this new entity. I respect the fact they couldn't tell me that. They didn't want to lie to me and pretend like they weren't doing it. The easiest thing was just to ignore me. I later found out that that was the reason that they did that. NOV, of course, is going to be a big player in that. As you know, Liberty Energy from Chris Wright's company, Liberty Energy, is an investor in Oklo. I don't want to divulge anything that I shouldn't, but I know many of the majors are now engaged in various levels in trying to get into the nuclear development game.

Ed Coyne: Let's talk about Fulcrum for a minute because you do some really cool stuff. You're really working with the smaller regional companies out there. Tell me some of the things you are doing where you're having some impact and have a seat at the table. Do you envision crossing over more to the nuclear side of the table?

Doug Sandridge: No. I don't see us crossing over to the nuclear side of the table. We're a small company that has a rather good set of investors, family offices and money that's pretty closely held. The people who invested in our properties in the past are typically people who want to buy proven-producing properties and see an immediate return. You're going to buy a property for $50 million and you know you're going to get X amount of revenue the first month you own it, the second month you own it, and you hope that you get your $50 million back in two years, maybe less, maybe a little more.

There's no right way or wrong way. It's just that we have catered to the type of investor that wants to do that. Investing in nuclear energy requires a completely different type of investor profile and a completely different timeline for recovering their money. You're going to be investing large sums of money that you might not realize any return on for 10 years. It's not right or wrong. Our investors that we have cultivated want to buy properties where they get an immediate return. I don't see us looking at nuclear energy, but we do look at things outside of core oil and gas.

We've invested in some energy-related technologies, not necessarily oil and gas-related, and looked at deals in helium and other things. We're not 100%, but primarily, that's our wheelhouse. We find properties that we think we can acquire, we can improve the operations. We can take something that was only marginally profitable for someone else and by better operations, better back of the house, back of the office staff, by better operating techniques and management, improve the profitability of it. Then ultimately, we're normally going to sell those. We don't keep a lot of legacy properties for decades or anything like that. We're going to find a property, produce it, get our money back, improve it, and sell it at the right time.

Ed Coyne: Let's stay on oil and gas then for a second because you mentioned something about technology. I think most people out there, or most investors or most consumers of energy think of oil and gas as old fashioned or the-- Fracking obviously made it relevant for a while and people talked about that, but what are some of the technologies out there that are keeping oil and gas at the forefront as well? What are some of the cool things that the oil and gas industry are doing that are sustainable, cleaner, that kind of thing? Is there anything out there that maybe the average listener wouldn't know about what's happening?

Doug Sandridge: Sure. I think anybody who's in our industry probably already knows this, but for those of you who are listening and maybe don't know, the oil and gas industry has been incredibly innovative. One of the things that has really happened in the last five years, not everywhere, and certainly not overseas, but in the US, we have really, really clamped down on fugitive methane emissions. To be frank, our industry did not do a very good job of that for a long time.

Some of my friends will be angry that I said that, but the reality is that we should have been doing a better job on that. A lot of the improvements have been forced upon us. In Colorado, where I live, there's no more routine flaring of gas whatsoever, period. We've found ways to utilize the gas, found better ways to reduce leaks and that sort of thing. That's a good thing. Now, unfortunately, we produce the cleanest molecule of natural gas and the cleanest molecule of oil anywhere in the world.

What we're doing here is not having one bit of difference on what's going on in Kazakhstan or Russia or wherever else. Yes, here, that's happening. Another thing is that we are developing technologies to drill and complete wells, drill and frack wells, better, cheaper, and more efficiently. One of those things is that a lot of companies, like Chris Wright's Liberty Energy, are moving towards electric fleets. That's good for people that are nearby so it's quieter. That's good. It can also be cleaner because instead of burning diesel, you're taking electricity off the grid or generating it yourself.

If you can do that, you are causing considerably less emissions by using an electric fleet for both of those processes, the drilling and the completion. Now, of course, that depends on where you are. If you're plugging into a grid that's all produced with coal, you're not really doing much. If you're producing into a grid that's a lot of wind and a lot of nuclear and a lot of other alternative cleaner energies, then you really cleaned up the oil field.

The other thing that the companies have done in the last few years is they've really reduced the footprint where you can drill. For instance, 15 years ago, you would drill a vertical well, and you'd build a pad and you put a drilling rig on that pad, and you'd drill down into the earth, and then you'd move over 600 feet and do it again and move over 600 feet and do it again and again and again. You can see old legacy places even in Colorado, but particularly in Texas, where if you just took an aerial view, you'd see an oil well every 600 feet. Of course, in West Texas, it really didn't matter that much because you're just disturbing a little bit of grazing land. As the population grows and as we move oil fields into closer proximity to populated areas, that is important.

Now, of course, we drill horizontal wells. You build a pad, and when we first were doing horizontal wells, you'd build a pad and you drill a well down, and then you drill a mile north. Then maybe if you're really on the edge of technology, you drill another well a mile south. From that one pad, you've developed a mile north and a mile south through this horizontal well. That's fantastic. Now, we're in places where you put a well, and you might drill 32 wells north and 32 wells south from the same pad. You're developing a large area.

It's impactful, but then the next step of how impactful that is, we used to drill one mile north and one mile south. Now, some of these people are drilling two miles. Two miles is completely standard. Maybe even a lot of people drilling out three miles or four miles laterally. From this pad, you're drilling four miles north and four miles south, and you might be drilling 20 or 30 wells at one time. Then the latest thing that's catching on is to really access places.

In Colorado, in the DJ basin, there are so many people living there now that finding a surface location is so hard you can't access some places. To the degree that you can reduce the number of surface locations is better for the community, it's better for truck traffic, it's better for all these things. Now people are drilling U-turn wells. They'll drill two miles north, steer the well in a U-shape, and drill it two miles south back to the same location. Now you've impacted twice as much acreage with a single surface hole location.

Ed Coyne: That's so far above my pay grade, but I'm trying to draw visuals of it as you were talking to see if I could understand. Very cool though. It goes back to something that I wanted to touch on too, which is the consumption of clean energy and energy in general versus the production. It does seem like where technology's really adding value is how we produce energy, how we create energy.

That's a great example of how that's becoming so impactful and how it's keeping oil and gas at the forefront of part of the energy solution, the cleaner more sustainable energy. It can be cleaner, it can be more sustainable than people really give it credit for. I think it can go hand in hand with nuclear. That's why I was so intrigued by the oil and gas executives for nuclear initiative that you started because it's just one example of how they all can coexist, which I think is really fascinating.

Doug Sandridge: Just to give you an example, I think we have already talked about how you're going to see crossover from some of these companies. I'm not going to talk about any particular company, but if there's a service company that is going to get into nuclear energy, they probably didn't get into wind and solar because they understood that they probably were not going to be good for their return on their investors, and they didn't want to be tied to a bunch of subsidies.

They wanted a real business that made sense on its own. I think nuclear could give them the opportunity to make investments in those types of industries that are going to help them, and it's going to help them with their ESG score because now there's pressure on these companies to reduce emissions. If now 20% of their business is in clean nuclear, then suddenly, that reduces the footprint of their ESG. They may not be doing it for that reason, but that is a good thing for them to be able to also have an alternative energy, which also happens to make money and also happens to be clean. I think that's part of the genius of pairing nuclear with oil and gas.

Chris Wright's company used to be called Liberty Frac. Last year I assumed that they changed the name. I should have known this wasn't true, but I assumed they changed the name from Liberty Frac so that it wouldn't offend all the fracking haters, so we just call it Liberty Energy. I assume that because there are so many fracking haters. I assume that, but if you know Chris Wright, he will never cave into that kind of pressure. He changed it to Liberty Energy because he said in 10 years, we're going to be an energy company, we're not going to be a frac company.

We're going to be building small modular reactors and providing that energy to run our frac fleets, but we're also going to have extra energy that we're going to sell into the grid and extra energy that we can use to help in emergencies like Winter Storm Uri in Texas. We're no longer just a frac company; we're an energy company. I see that could be the case for a lot of these other companies. Nuclear may not be their only industry or even their main industry, but I think it could be a significant portion of a lot of these companies’ portfolios.

Ed Coyne: It's cool to see everybody coexisting and working together on this. I think it's going to be fascinating in our lifetime to watch this coexistence of energy sources, how they get produced, and who’s producing them. I think we're at the tip of the spear of this evolving over time. Any last parting shots you'd like to leave our listeners with?

Doug Sandridge: I think it's incumbent on all of us. What you guys are doing is great, and what I've been trying to do for the last decade is pretty similar, and that is to increase our energy IQ. Energy is so important to every aspect of our lives. We take it for granted. The average person doesn't know where electricity comes from. They think it comes from the light switch. That doesn't make for good policy. Our policymakers need to be better educated, but so does the public because, ultimately, the policymakers will do what their constituents want them to do.

If the constituents aren't knowledgeable, then they will demand bad energy policy because of virtue signaling or whatever else it is. Education is absolutely the key to this. Whatever we can do to bring better education to our young people, to our high school students, to our college students, and to the public in general at the Thanksgiving dinner table, which is what we need to focus on now. Making people understand energy so that we can have better energy equals better energy policy and better energy IQ.

More energy knowledge is going to enable us to make better decisions about our energy policy rather than just relying on the whims of people who make these decisions that don't really know the-- Energy is so complicated and it's so interconnected that it's really hard for the average person to understand how systemic energy is and how each of the sectors affects other sectors. You talk about the electricity grid and how complicated that is. So many people have no idea. I think for me, for the rest of my life, energy education is my goal. I can't do much else, but I can hopefully move the needle on that.

Ed Coyne: I think that example you used earlier in the podcast with Diablo Canyon really got over the finish line with the brownouts. It allowed people the reality of, hey, we need this. Not just aspirational. This is something that needs to happen now, or these are going to continue. Increasing all our energy IQs is a worthy cause for sure. I try to do it every day. My daughter, who's 25, constantly tells me how her friends listen to the Sprott Podcast now, and they're trying to learn. That's gratifying to know that the younger generations are thinking about this in a way that they weren't 10 years ago or 5 years ago. Hopefully, that will continue. I certainly appreciate you taking the time today to talk to us on Sprott Radio.

Doug Sandridge: All right. Let's all remain energy sober and go out and educate it.

Ed Coyne: Great. Thank you all. Once again, I'm Ed Coyne, and thank you for listening to Sprott Radio.