Nick DeIuliis on How America’s Energy Revolution Is Reshaping the World

Opportunity is a really takes the impact of domestic energy to another level of magnitude

“order of magnitude, or to deposit it. How that plays out in many different ways.”

Some of them we can foresee, and that are in front of us now, and some of us, and some of those things that we can't foresee right now, but when we look at it in hindsight, we're going to see how that makes sense that it unfolded that way, because of domestic energy. Yeah, it just strikes me, you know, from a week or up, we're just in such a better position

as a nation, from a domestic energy standpoint, it really is revolutionary. I mean, you

live through it professionally, you know, I'm kind of observing it, but it really is really remarkable. Unbelievable, and everything, I'll give you a sort of a domestic and an international component to this on what it means beyond even just sort of the private sector. Americans are capable of achieving extraordinary things when they have the freedom and opportunity

to do so. This is American Potential. Hey, everyone, and welcome to the American Potential podcast, I'm your host, David from. So we've talked about energy on this podcast quite a bit, just because it's such a big part of everyday life, and, you know, demand just keeps growing. I mean, this particularly true right now, when the heat index gets above a hundred with high humidity and the summer

and we want to keep warm. But today's guest is Nick Duelis, who's worked in the energy industry for 30 plus years and has been the CEO or chairman of the board of five public energy companies. He's currently the director and former CEO of CNX Resources Corporation, and HOSOPOTCAS and talks all the time about energy and his life's work in it. I'm super excited to talk

to Nick here, so Nick, welcome. Thanks for joining American Potential, and I'm really excited to talk about such an important topic. Hey, likewise, David, thanks for the opportunity, it's awesome. So you're a native of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, a place that knows something about

“energy, and just a great place. I don't know, I think it's still kind of a hidden gem.”

I think some people have some perception of the Pittsburgh area of Western Pennsylvania, but I love it. So you grew up there. How'd you end up moving into the energy field? Well, yeah, I'd like to tell you it was part of a grand plan and just strategic planning from my perspective, but that would that would be a fall's hood. It's a funny story, you're right. The legacy of Western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, it's so

immersed in energy. It's so much history's happened here across a broad range of the energy spectrum out through the decades, and you sort of grow up in this region, and this sort of holds true for Appalachia as well, not just Western PA, where you're immersed in it, but you're not necessarily aware of it. And the history just permeates everything, but it's

sort of so prevalent that you get the loose notice that just becomes second nature to you.

And my way of falling into the energy space was almost by accident, despite being immersed in it and living around it all my life. I wanted to, I'd have been just purely content to coming out of high school ahead off to the steel mill or the railroad or doing something like that, retrospect to a career, which was basically everything that I had known from a

“family and friend perspective. That's what was familiar to me. But I grew up, I was a”

child of the 80s, and during the 80s, in this region, like a lot of different areas across sort of middle America and a Rospel, there wasn't really any opportunity. Things were going in the wrong direction when it came to those types of professions and industries. So because of that sort of reality, I ended up going to college, then state, study chemical engineering, and the overall effect of that when I got out after four years was okay, I'm a chemical engineer,

but I had no idea what a chemical engineer did. I didn't know anybody who was a chemical engineer,

I didn't have any family that basically had even done a college, other than engineering. So

I had this sort of disconnect on, I got an accreditation, but what does a chemical engineer did? And low and behold, through just back then, this part of the 1990, the way interviews used to be, right? This is before internet and before all this, that's the things you went to the newspaper, and I know I wanted to stay in the region. There was an ad for a chemical engineer for a place called console, our consolidation coal company, and you wanted an individual

to work on power plant issues and how different coals and fuels would perform in power plants and what the economic impacts were on bus bar costs and whatnot. And one thing led to another, that's where I started my career, and 35 plus years later, and basically still involved in part of the team with what is effectively a lineage, but the same sort of root genesis of a competent,

30 plus years in energy, you've seen it kind of transform, I mean you just said what you're

called a natural gas, even the company you've been with, what's that transformation been like, and how have you progressed through that professional? I don't, I don't look through is another more seismic, a material evolution that we've seen in the energy field in specific to domestic energy over the past three, four decades of the change in terms of what's the thinking was strategically then, say in the early 1990s versus now, just think about how things have done a complete 180.

I mean, it wasn't in our long ago, where are we going to get natural gas? How are we going to import natural gas from other places? You look at what the shell revolution brought to the table, and yeah, everybody talks about the technology aspects of horizontal drilling and completion

“technology, certainly those were crucial drivers and ingredients to the recipe, but also,”

you will find ways to reinvent, reimagine, repurpose existing technologies, existing infrastructure from mid-stream assets to power assets and everything in between, and also to sort of tap into that legacy of places like Abel Attra and Western Pennsylvania with that sort of energy acumen. There were a lot of skill sets, a lot of sort of professions, a lot of programs, there were sort of tweet and were fined instead of having to be built from the ground up

to start to develop unintended that pipeline of talent to sort of mammal equipment, you know, apply to technology and do those types of things. So they were individually these sort of contributing factors where, you know, so much foreseeable, not maybe earth-shattering, deonting the technological innovations that I mentioned, but in total, punitively,

“when you put them all together, just as completely reshaped, not just the region of Abel Attra,”

and not just national domestic energy, but you start thinking about the geopolitical implications and how it has sort of shifted things, any very good way, it's clearly evident in a very good way across the globe and how the sort of state of human beings have been improved because of

these types of things and amazing, amazing transformation. So yeah, in many ways, should have seen

a common when you look at the individual factors, I guess, or could have, and yes, it is certainly the next chapter in the energy sort of history and lineage of the nation and a region, but boy, when you look at the overall humans of global impacts of this, we haven't seen something like this in decades and decades, perhaps a century. We have to go back to, you know, the Haymaker while with natural gas in Western Pennsylvania, or sort of the automation

of long-wall mining with coal, and how coal was basically replacing wood is an energy source back in the day, what happened with, or a whole bunch of different industries tied to the power generation, and there's other industries I mentioned driving manufacturer and integration, the steel industry, and things like that. You'd have to go back to those types of innovations and directions to sort of equal what we're seeing today. So the kind of the revolution that has

happened over the last few decades with natural gas becoming such a central focus of our, you know, source of energy. How is that, you talked about the even international and geopolitical ramifications of that? How do you see, how was that help reshape things internationally? And then I'd love to talk about how it's shaped things domestically. It's, it's done both to your point. There's also this issue of those areas, those policies, those leaders that have recognized the logic, science, the

data, and those that still have yet to do service, those stubbornly ignoring it. So you could look and sort of take a walk across the map as well as a list of recent events. You could start

“with Europe. I think that's a, in a beautiful sort of illustration of when you get this right”

and when you get this wrong, what the implications are of the energy revolution and places like Appalachia and how that changes geopolitics. Europe, until to look at something like the

shell revolution and basically the lack of the better terms said in FX and started to embark on a

series of policies that shunned the obvious opportunities in the efficient and those types of things that natural gas and all the downstream benefits would prove from it. Instead adopted that zero policies and sort of the assumptions that they're embedded within that things like wind and solar at scale, large scales are reliable and affordable and low cost and those types of things that they're even scalable to begin with. So what happened when you saw that was that it was still

this thing called, you know, the real world energy balance. That's great from a policy perspective,

demand that you need reliable and affordable power to sort of drive, something had a fill that gap

in the energy balance, the physics of it and that was Russian energy and that reliance on Russian energy, then triggered a realization with certain leaders that they had leverage that leverage of course manifested in what we had today in Eastern Europe and what's unfolding there. I argue from again going back to like a big picture sort of geopolitical picture that until the EU priced their energy policy, until they correct that, the slot. There is not going to be a

pleasant sort of, uh, call it settlement or answer to what is ailing Ukraine, uh, was regard to Russian aggression because it does go back and ties back images. That's sort of an example of the

bad side of when you sort of ignore these types of revelations. The good side, hey, you see it everywhere,

“uh, on the United States side, going from basically net imports or net export, I think we just”

set our record on oil, exports recently, LNG, you know, exports and what they do to places as far away as Asia, the developing world might have an access to that type of energy and what it does to be given condition and everything from life, the expectancies to education. So you go plenty of examples in the United States or literally all that infrastructure was reversed because of this disruptive technology. And I think you've also seen a recent example of the power of this type

of domestic energy resurgence when you're looking at the Iran conflict, because despite the

volatility and we certainly know from every kind of oil prices to everything else all other markets

that sort of prove from it. Yeah, there's been a lot of volatility, including to this day, right, with the taping that we're doing in today. But that volatility compared to our experiences in the 1970s, right, with similar types of situations, that volatility, at least with respect to the United States and nations has sort of got their energy policy right in rational, it's been greatly muted and in greatly reduced, which puts you in the position, right, you have options. I would

argue on the cable in dealing issues like in Indian capabilities, that if you didn't have that

“energy secure, you wouldn't be able to consider. So I think you've seen these sort of examples”

and episodes popping up everywhere. And I think there's a lot of hidden ones, too, that to get lost on the general public. PGM, our full recently, as you know, went through a heat wave in our original eye about to go through another one and just like the polar vortex that went through to this winter, it performed admirably and what really drove its performance was the same old sort of tenants. So the energy security, it was nuclear, all fire generation, and most importantly,

natural gas fire generation. When you look at the contributions of wind and solar, they were riddled to not during the most demanding period that you'll see, right, with respect to a grid. So you see these examples popping up everywhere and they are just providing the real world is so dependent, such a reality check on energy that you're going to see these examples good and battle type. So that is how we just use in Pennsylvania with the polar vortex coming through,

stands at Star Contrast to what you described in Europe, right? So that they were indexed for ideological reasons it seems like. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong to, you know, wind and solar and don't have a built-out portfolio so that when those come up short, they're energy deficient. Whereas we've built out a system where we do use the resource that we have like coal and gas and nuclear to provide the energy that we need. Do you think that those are like, that it's accurate, just say like those

are the kind of contrast? You use the word ideology. I think that's a perfect term. And in the way, I think about it, just start with basics and when you look at energy auctions, pieces of the

“energy portfolio. It's going to be site-specific, but you should be filtering those decisions to the”

same metrics. Reliability, right, you need the power, the energy when you need the most of reliability is key for the ability, right, to cost of it and sort of be the abundance of it being able to meet the demand that it is in place to have set loose opportunities like AI or whatever the opportunity to my date. It has the draw-down on the main power. If you start looking at different energy auctions for different sort of applications or regions of the world,

this answers are going to be a little bit different. So if you go to Arizona, solar at scale is going to be a pretty good fix, a wonderful fix, right? If you look at certain offshore places and Mikey places, we're offshore wind makes the most sense or at least he and being a significant piece of the grid. But to say that we're going to mandate these, then he's from a policy perspective, going to mandate them everywhere. If that is insanity because this thing solar does

because of the lack of sunlight for wide swaths of the year here, whereas something like natural

gas generation and a place like Pennsylvania makes all the sense in the world. But the policy with a sort of embedding and ideology, it starts to dictate instead of letting science, math, or it's a return rational sort of physics of the matter dictate what those decisions are. So you're seeing that in places like the EU, you're seeing that in places like California. And by the way, if you were to and there's been firms and the thing tanks that have done this,

the Institute for Energy Research IER does this they correlate sort of net zero policy intensity of a state or of a nation in the costs of energy. And guess what you see, right? The more

net zero intensive or ideological it is, the higher the costs, let alone what your affordability

might be of that. So there's, you know, many again, data points that the point to this, you hit the mail on the head. And by the way, it takes years, cumulatively to see this. But there are wound to be a bunch of follow on impacts beyond what your power bill is. So if you go to a place like Jeremy, Jeremy before their implementation of met zero ideology was sort of the manufacturing

“envy of the world, right? Everybody wanted to figure out how can be more like the German model?”

They were fiscally responsible. They had manufacturing crawls. They were best in class across a range of things from machine poles to automotive everything, right? Where they at now? Very different situation. There are no longer fiscally responsible. And manufacturing core has been hollowed out.

And the job losses are mousing the industries of the companies within them or struggling. You basically

compete in everybody's points too well, though the war on Ukraine and trade conflict. And now the conflict can run. And all these issues that are maybe contributors, but they're not the core driving issue. The core driving issue is obvious. It's their flawed energy policies because we start mess with energy. When you get energy right, everything else can flow from it and a society in an economy. When you get energy wrong, nothing is going to sort of in due well

“and that type of environment. So as you look at like our domestic situation, I think it's really”

informative to look at state by state because some of them like California, unfortunately, where I live in Illinois, I say ideological decisions to favor something like wind and solar over more reliable forms of energy. How do you see that playing out going forward for the nation? We've got the patchwork of policies, but obviously what's reliable eventually should carry the day? And then obviously you had the Trump administration come in a much more favorable environment,

regulatory standpoint to try to encourage more energy production. What do you see going forward over the next decade plus? Well, I guess I see a bit piece of good news and a big piece of badness or maybe a question mark if my badness. So on the good news side, the ICA high level of inevitability. So you can embrace things like net zero policies all you want. You could pretend it's another sort of flawed assumption there. The wind and solar had zero carbon footprints.

They do not. They have tremendous carbon footprints when you look at the life cycle sort of realities in how they're manufactured and how they perform. But you can do that for a certain

“period of time. And then sooner or later, energy reality will take old. So I think Europe,”

of pieces or parts of Europe are starting to come to that realization. Maybe these policies weren't the smartest Afro. Maybe we need to change course. Maybe we need to get back to the rational. So what I do like where I do feel good about is whether you're looking at Illinois, California, EU, UN for that matter. National policy when administration change the physics is going to dictate in the end a realization that we need to get this right. The bad news or the question mark

that I'm worried about is how long does that take and how much damage right beautifully is done before that realization comes to root. You can destroy an awful lot of value. You can ruin a lot of industries. A lot of lies create a lot of human misery before you come to that realization. So the most extreme example of this would be the developing world where you've got billions of people currently that don't have access to reliable, affordable energy. And their lives can be greatly

improved if you get them that. So when are we going to get them that eventually they will get it. Like if it's going to take 10 to 20 years there's a lot of damage done between now and then to the future. But if we get it sort of right in sooner like now you're talking again in terms of

sort of collateral damage will be when we're trying to figure that out from the developments,

“Germany, states, etc. to be the developing world that's out there looking in hunger and”

financial energy. What are you most excited about as you look ahead in the energy sector? Well, thinking about that sort of seismic change that we started our conversation on I see a lot of that momentum continuing. And in the reason I see it continuing is not necessarily because I'm sort of assuming another disrupted technology comes to the fore like horizontal drilling or completion technology or whatever the case by the I'm sure those will happen. We just don't

know how or when how they're timed. But what I'm really excited about is now you're starting to see and it goes back to how energy drives everything out there. Now you're starting to see all these different other exciting areas of economy and society sort of plugging into again uninsented, plugging into this opportunity that the domestic energy has created. So a big example of that was the tech industry. It wasn't that long ago where the tech industry was almost one of the ideological

authors of net zero. And sort of looked at things like the natural gas industry with a certain level of this thing. Today was AI, right? One of their innovations, one of their disrupted technologies,

“they realized that the most important thing to making that work and to making that opportunity come”

to fruition is reliable, affordable, low-cost energy. So, you know, they sort of got religion when it comes to what the energy can bring to the table. You're seeing that everywhere. You're seeing that was manufacturing. You're seeing that again, geopolitics. You're seeing that with individual rights which are tied to geopolitics. So, I'm very bullish and very excited about how to be sort of follow on opportunities. It really takes the impact with domestic energy to another level of magnitude,

order of magnitude or the positive. How that plays out in many different ways. Some of them we can proceed and that are in front of us now and some of us and some of those things that we can't foresee right now, we'll only look at it in hindsight. We're going to say, yeah, that makes sense that it unfolded that way because of domestic energy. Yeah, it just strikes me, you know, from

“when we grew up, we're just in such a better position as a nation from the domestic energy standpoint.”

It really is revolutionary. I mean, you lived through it professionally. You know, I'm kind of

observing it, but it really is pretty remarkable. Unbelievable. And everything, I'll give you a sort of a domestic and an international component to this on what it means beyond even just sort of the private sector. As you know, Pennsylvania has an impact fee on natural gas development. And in that impact fee is providing hundreds of millions of dollars. And now we're counting them in the billions of dollars to Pennsylvania, counties and communities and Pennsylvania general

fund. So the impact that those dollars you use to work, whether it's education, basic services, infrastructure, you name it. I'm sure our legislators and governor can find plenty of uses for that money, right? That's something that is entirely provided by the domestic energy industry within Pennsylvania. Can't think of another industry in the state that is contributed more in terms of just absolute dollar magnitude over the past five, 10 years than the natural gas industry. And

all the good that it is done. It's that linking, right? You don't hear about that linking. You don't read the story about how this school or that bridge or this program in the community was largely funded through something like the natural gas industry or the domestic energy industry. You go out to sort of the geopolitical global view. You see sort of the the same things occurring again with how this is reshaping sort of individual rights and sort of democrat process and

freedom and whatnot across the globe. I read something the other day and it gets missed again where a certain media outlet, it can be both know, was lamenting that the ability for Europe to sort of rely on American energy is somewhat shaky because of the relationship, self-sandowns that was seen through something or the rhetoric coming out of each size of leadership. That's ridiculous because if you think through Europe's options, what other options

do they have right now? Right. And that's Europe was just talked to that. Those aren't going to work. So, your ideas, more solar panels, more windmills in Europe, that's a recipe for further pain and a disaster long-term. Russia has proved that that's not a reliable provider of energy.

So, we know that's not going to happen. The Middle East, that supply chain does never look

more fragile and it does currently. So, what do you left with at the end of the day when you just sort of could away all the rhetoric and all the drama and you just look at the quantifiable

In Japan and even going on and on. So, you see this domestically within a region like

Appalachia and Pennsylvania, you see the benefits globally when you're looking at where is or where our places like Europe and Japan go and you get their energy to contain one with all the value that they're creating as societies and kindness. It all comes back to the same then. Touching on Appalachia and Pennsylvania, you know, such a great tradition of

“coal being such an important resource. And I think it's kind of bad rap over the last few decades,”

but it did such a foundational resource still to our energy make up. Can you get a talk about the role that coal currently plays and why it's such an important part of our energy consolation? Yeah, it hasn't gone away and to say that it's got a bad rap as an industry as an

understatement. It's been frankly vilified for far too long. And it is just an essential fundamental

sort of peace of the energy portfolio, whether it's an origin, the United States in general, or if you're looking at sort of the global economy. Now, the interesting thing about this is that if again, go back to this summer when Pete Demand happened in PJM or this past winter during the World Tax, the Polar Vortex, coal was right there alongside nuclear and natural gas. Natural gas was the biggest single contributor. Nuclear was probably second, maybe around. Natural gas was probably

47% of the PJM grid. Nuclear, let's call it a quarter, 25%, coal is right around 20% of my memory serves. So, you know, without coal in that sort of generation mix, places like PJM are in trouble. And that old true for a wide swath of the planet when it comes to their energy infrastructure. And the overall sort of carbon intensity, when you start looking at natural gas, generation, whole generation, and how that's done, and it's going to be very site-specific.

But this idea that that's got it reaches carbon footprints or those forms do,

“but wind and solar do not. And all the battery and redundancy and everything else that you need to”

have that backed up, those supply chains are just magically zero. That's nonsense. And when you start looking at the environmental standards behind how say coal is manufactured in places like Pennsylvania or West Virginia today versus environmental standards of how all rare earths and coal ball and everything else is sort of developed in mind and process. And then it's up in a wind-tired and solar panel or battery, you start to even see a wider gap when it comes to sustainability metrics

where coal stacks up much better than people think compared to the backing thing that has the shiny sort of marketing of wind solar batteries, et cetera, but they have some sort of, you know, the skeletons in the closet when it comes to the realities of how they come to be. So there's a, you know, a bit of a non-objective view that's been painted. And if you get back to

“the data, you start looking at what the actual numbers are telling us, coal doesn't just need”

the Apple place within the mix. It needs to play a commoner well because it should, based on, you know, the numbers, so to speak, with a data. In the history of Apple atcha,

it's such a special place, Western Pennsylvania, and Northern West Virginia, and the first

a major sort of commercial natural gas well and field was occurring just east to Pittsburgh with the Haymaker well and the Murray's Real Field. You've got, I've actually the commercial mining coal that started in Appalachia and this continued on to this day. You've got the midstream infrastructure. It was basically built because the problems on early on with natural gas rate, the supply fell off so quickly, but his demand grew in places like Pittsburgh, the wells from Western

Pennsylvania couldn't meet the demand in Pittsburgh. So entities like standard oil and these other companies they figured out how to build long distance pipelines to get more caliphic natural gas fields and say, "Norning West Virginia" to get their production sort of hyped up to the Pittsburgh region. That energy, whether it was coal or natural gas with the oil industry, which also started in Pennsylvania, with the Drake, or in the Drake well, up in the world of cities, just to north of Pittsburgh,

all that stuff fed that is downstream industries. So it power the railroad industry, it created freight for the railroad industry, which then spun its web across America, it traded and kept the steel industry going, which was why it was situated here or the other main factor in it came with it. So this hit, this region, so steeped in history, and people tended to look at that history, what happened in the eights and the seventies as what I was then, that doesn't happen now.

You've lost track of it. No, it is happening now, as we speak, just more efficient, better, obviously, and more technologically advanced. None of these industries,

power. And we should be not just cognizant of it, but we should be grateful for it.

“Well, I think none of that region, but I mean, for our nation, it's, we were a blessed nation”

from a resource standpoint. I spent a lot of time in Alaska recently, and I mean, that's just the resources there. I was in Spend Diamond, New Mexico, and Texas, and the resources there

are amazing. It's just all over the country who've just been really blessed. It's really a

to be like a ideological decision or a policy-maker decision as to whether or not we really allow innovators to go and make it as productive as possible to help all Americans, you know, help bring down our costs and make lives better. I mean, it's so tied to our quality of life. It's incredible international security.

“It's still the Federation where you need to let the doers do, right? And you mentioned New Mexico,”

I saw there was a recent federal lease sale for a billion dollars. It raised for taxpayers,

right, to then turn loose the private sector to develop the oil security that we want to see

domestically. That's, that's good all the way around. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Nick, you got a, you have a podcast where you talk, you go in depth and talk about a lot of these issues. Can you be tell tell our listeners if they want to find out more and really do a deep dive on an energy internationally domestically? Would tell them about your podcast and how to find you? Yeah. I do a lot of advocacy and sort of just sort of font pieces. I'll call them across different platforms. One of most active on currently

is probably linked in, just underneath the oil. You want to follow, be happy to engage with anyone

that's interested in use that they've got versus what I'm hosting there. Also, I've got the

Farm Middle Podcast. There's archive deficits there that the best place to access those or some of the other commentary, but I've wrote you sort of a little longer version format beyond the, the LinkedIn post is a personal website, maketheolias.com. So if you can, the hardest part of that, to follow, it will be stone deolias, but if you can sort of type in Nick deolias.com or something close to it, that'll be sort of the collection point for a lot of the essays, the Farm Middle Podcast

that you mentioned, and other thinkings done up piece there recently on energy reporting, a media that got a lot of the attention and a post in some of those summers on LinkedIn too, the sort of common flaws that you find when mainstream media outlets are reporting energy matters. They, they are sort of committing a sort of sub set, I'll call them, while they call them the dirty buzz and of these flawed tactics to sort of skew when this can screw the story of what's actually

happening versus what's being recorded. So check that out and again, I've got a lot of feedback up it got some thoughts on it. Happy to hear. Great. Well, Nick, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for sharing your deep knowledge and experience and making us all smarter for it. I hope people check out all of you on all the platforms and you really appreciate you joining us. Hey, I had a blast and I appreciate the opportunity and event status to take care.

Stay cool in and you Illinois out there west of Chicago. We'll do it again. Hey folks, if you like this episode, we'll like to stay connected with the podcast. Be sure to like to subscribe to our channel as well as following us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube.

“Not always remember. Liberty and freedom are easily taken for granted.”

Don't take it for granted. Go out there and defend freedom. Thanks for joining us and we'll see you on the next episode. Thank you for listening to American Potential. You may listen to more stories from Americans working every day to expand freedom and opportunity in their communities by visiting of americanpotential.com.