URGENT URGENT - ABANDON SHIP NOW!

This is the fate that awaits every single country on the planet

I have warned many barnyard animals in New Zealand multiple times that they are sitting on a powder keg but as with the Death Shot warnings, they go unheeded.

The thing is… New Zealand is not a mission critical country so unlike the UK, France and Germany, LNG ships will not be rerouted to prop up this dying animal. In fact New Zealand does not even have facilities to accept LNG.

This is going to get extremely ugly.

Meanwhile, all NZ passport holders essentially have dual citizenship with Australia and can easily move up a deck on the Titanic. But most won’t.

This is like informing the turkey that he’s on the menu for Thanksgiving, opening the cage and telling him to flee. And he just sits there waiting for his head to be chopped off.

On the bright side, I was able to dump a property in Queenstown at the height of the market in early 2024 on a couple of barnyard animals who were fleeing the unravelling UK no doubt believing New Zealand was a safe haven. This is what happens when morons refuse to accept the truth - this, and vaccine injuries.

Why drilling for fossil fuels is not expected to fix NZ’s energy crisis

Six months ago, Taranaki businessman John Burling received an abrupt call: his gas company was increasing prices by 40 percent.

Burling, who owns the Taranaki-based Carac Group engineering and manufacturing company, was floored. "What do you mean? How do I pass it on?'"

The reply was stark. "There's a shortage of gas, so that's going to be the new price."

Overnight, Carac Group had to cut powder coating plant operations from five days to four, shelving expansion plans and curtailing production due to the energy-intensive gas-fired ovens.

Across the country, many businesses are facing the same gas woes.

"The untold story here is that there's a very large number of smaller industrial businesses that rely on gas and frankly they're gonna struggle to stay afloat," says Barney Irvine, executive director of the Northern Infrastructure Forum. "A lot of these businesses are feeling very desperate and pretty lost."

New Zealand's natural gas is drawn from wells in Taranaki, on the North Island's wild west coast. Around 290,000 households use gas for cooking and heating; in business, it is burned at dairy factories, fertiliser plants and in manufacturing. It's also used to produce electricity when there's not enough power generated from wind, water or the sun.

Until recently, gas was reliable, even when other energy sources were scarce. But now, our wells are old and in decline, and our gas supply is dwindling, fast.

Data released by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) in June reveals gas production has almost halved in the last ten years. Supply in February 2024 was the lowest since the 1980s. Gas reserves - the estimated available gas in the deep, underground reservoirs - have also fallen sharply, down 27 percent in the year to January. Forecasts say there is barely enough gas left in our existing oil and gas fields to last the decade, and even that is an optimistic guess.

Demand now outstrips supply, forcing some businesses to struggle for gas, others onto 'demand management' plans requiring production shutdowns to support the electricity grid, and some to close operations entirely.

"In my opinion gas supply is currently our most pressing energy security issue," says energy commentator Larry Blair. "The scale of the problem is huge, and we don't have any readily available alternatives to turn to."

To combat the shortfall, the government has repealed the former Labour government's 2018 ban on new offshore oil and gas exploration permits. The policy aims to 'future-proof' the natural gas industry and reduce reliance on imported coal during dry years when hydro dams are low.

The bill, spearheaded by Resources Minister Shane Jones, passed in the House last week. Coupled with a $200m co-investment in gas exploration, Jones says the policy will signal to international petrochemical companies New Zealand is "open for business".

"It's to send a message that we will invest with you if it's appropriate as the Crown, but more importantly, there is a long-term future in New Zealand in terms of how we power our economy by using gas or coal."

Industry has celebrated the law change. John Carnegie, chief executive of Energy Resources Aotearoa called the bill a "pragmatic and necessary step to help rebuild investor confidence."

Will it fix the problem?

Jones and the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, have blamed the 2018 exploration ban for the current state of the gas market.

"The basic problem is that we don't have enough gas thanks to Labour screwing the scrum by banning oil and gas," Luxon told Morning Report last month.

Jones has said the ban, which was implemented to address climate change, was "the most destructive decision in the history of New Zealand's industry."

But experts, including the government's own officials, warned the ban was not the main driver behind a lack of investment in gas or New Zealand's high energy prices - and won't be a magic fix for them either.

Global investment in speculative drilling for oil and gas has been declining since 2014, when the oil price crashed. Since then, oil companies have focused on high-ranking, lower-cost petroleum provinces, putting New Zealand at a "geographical and geological disadvantage" due to its isolation and relatively unexplored status, officials wrote in a Cabinet paper last year.

Records show that even before 2018, most of the major oil companies had given up their exploration permits and left New Zealand, citing "bad data", high technical risk or better opportunities elsewhere.

"Clearly the ban was an important nail in the coffin," says Green Party MP Steve Abel, who worked on Greenpeace's oil and gas campaign. "But the government also should have been well aware of the obvious evidence that gas was running out and no one was interested in drilling for more, even though a lot of oil majors came and had a look."

Whether those companies can be lured back will largely depend on whether we have enough big buyers to make it worth their while. New Zealand has a closed gas market, meaning there are no exports. Instead, local supply must meet local demand.

Historically, developing new gas fields has relied on big contracts from major users like methanol producer Methanex. But if demand from those large industrial users drops, it poses a risk that the remaining, smaller users might not be able to purchase enough gas to support new investment. Currently, demand is dropping rapidly - advice from officials on the $200m investment shows overall gas use has fallen by about a third since 2020, as companies close because of high prices, or decarbonise in the face of climate change.

"At this point, the market is collapsing faster than we can put new reserves back into it," Larry Blair says. There is also the lingering damage by the ban to the country's reputation as a safe place to invest, and the very real risk that the policy could be re-reversed with a change of government. "The problem I see for people looking at New Zealand is there's no confidence that there's a sustainable market there in the long term."

With such strong headwinds, experts say the $200m is unlikely to suddenly make it commercially viable to take a big gamble on entirely new discoveries, particularly when New Zealand hasn't found new gas in a new place for two decades or longer. It's more likely the money will be used to fossick around in our existing fields, trying to retrieve what's left.

The government knows this. Its own advice has acknowledged the plan's flaws and its low certainty of success. "Investments may not all be successful. The risk of failed drilling is high in our mature fields. In the last five years around $1.8 billion has been invested in drilling 58 wells, and this investment has not managed to maintain or increase our gas reserves," MBIE's advice to Jones in March this year said.

Even if the analysts are wrong, there is still the matter of timing. Data shows a new gas field could take a decade, or longer, to find, develop, and bring online.

"There will be nothing left to power by then," says Consumer NZ chief executive Jon Duffy.

"Why are we doubling down on expanding what is clearly an industry in decline? In my view we are taking an absolute wrong turn."

'No Plan A' to address the energy supply crunch

Critics like Duffy say more needs to be done now to bring down gas and electricity prices and shore up energy supply.

Last month, an influential collection of energy users and advocacy groups called on Luxon to urgently fix the "broken" energy sector, which they said was crippling industry and leaving families freezing during winter.

"Regional employers are shutting their doors, with hundreds of jobs and decades of investment lost," it said. "Families and communities are being left behind."

Workers moving towns in desperate quest for jobs

People are having to take jobs in different towns from where they live in order to find work as unemployment rises.

The unemployment rate has risen to a near-five year high of 5.2 percent as businesses either sack staff or stop hiring, with 156,000 people out of work.

Hawke's Bay woman Shannon Kendall - a project manager in the construction industry who had been looking for work over a year - had to take a job two hours away from where she lived to find employment.

"I was applying for jobs in Auckland, I was applying for jobs in Australia and I was ready to just do whatever I had to do and commute big time to have employment and to stay in my industry."

I understand that some are making Big Money on Only Fans… no need to commute.

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Elsewhere ….

This is why the US is the cleanest shirt in the filthy laundry. They cannot stop piling on massive amounts of debt without imploding.

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NOW: Trump on Operation Warp Speed: One Of The Most Incredible Things Ever Done In This Country

Finally…. my boy…