The Pipeliners Podcast Show Notes, Links, & Insider Terms

In this episode of the Pipeliners Podcast, Russel Treat interviews Bill Herrington about his book, The Green Real Deal, which explores the historical, geopolitical, and practical realities of energy, pipelines, and the transition to renewable energy. They discuss the critical role pipelines played in World War II, the misconceptions surrounding renewable energy and fossil fuels, and the influence of geopolitical and financial forces on energy policy. Herrington also shares insights into the future of energy, advocating for a balanced approach that includes cleaner use of fossil fuels, responsible renewables, and a revival of nuclear power.

  • Bill Herrington is Co-founder of Amerisource Secured Income Fund and the author of The Green Real Deal

  • The Green Real Deal provides an in-depth exploration of the intersection between energy independence, environmental policy, and national security. Drawing on decades of industry and financial experience, Herrington provides a balanced strategy for a secure and sustainable future.

  • Small Modular Reactors (SMRs): A new nuclear technology using molten salt cooling, requiring no external water source, and offering improved safety and efficiency.

  • Wood Pellets: A renewable energy source used in Europe as a substitute for coal. Their production involves clear-cutting forests in the U.S., raising concerns about environmental impact.

  • Nuclear Power: A clean and highly efficient energy source facing historical resistance due to safety concerns, such as the Three Mile Island accident, but now being reconsidered with advances in technology like small modular reactors.

  • Three Mile Island: A nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania where a partial meltdown occurred in 1979. This incident led to a shift from nuclear energy to coal and natural gas for power generation in the U.S.

  • Fracking: A method of extracting oil and gas by injecting liquid into subterranean rock formations. It revolutionized U.S. energy production, shifting the country from a natural gas importer to an exporter.

  • Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) is natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state (liquefied), at about -260° Fahrenheit, for shipping and storage. The volume of natural gas in its liquid state is about 600 times smaller than its volume in its gaseous state in a natural gas pipeline.

  • NGL (Natural Gas Liquids) is natural gas that has been cooled down to liquid form for ease and safety of non-pressurized storage or transport.

  • Renewable Energy: Energy sourced from natural processes such as solar, wind, and hydro.

  • Fossil Fuels: Non-renewable energy sources like coal, oil, and natural gas, essential for modern economies, military strength, and the production of materials like steel, plastics, and ammonia.

  • Emissions are the substances or byproducts released into the atmosphere via energy activity. There are several types of emissions:

  • The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) is an underground pipeline system running from North Dakota through the Midwest and connects to Texas to form the Bakken pipeline system. The project drew opposition in 2016 due to concerns over the effect on Native Americans.

The Green Real Deal Full Episode Transcript

Russel Treat: Welcome to the “Pipeliners Podcast,” episode 371, sponsored by EnerSys Corporation, providers of POEMS, the Pipeline Operations Excellence Management System. Operations and compliance software for pipeline operators to address safety program management, control room management, and field operations. Find out more about POEMS at EnerSyscorp.com.

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Announcer: The Pipeliners Podcast, where professionals, bubba geeks, and industry insiders share their knowledge and experience about technology, projects, and pipeline operations. Now your host, Russel Treat.

Russel: Thanks for listening to the Pipeliners Podcast. I appreciate you taking the time. To show the appreciation, we give away a customized YETI tumbler to one listener every episode. This week, our winner is Jeff Henry with UGI Energy Services. Congratulations, Jeff. Your YETI’s on its way. To learn how you can win this signature prize, stick around till the end of the episode.

This week we speak with Bill Herrington about his book, “The Green Real Deal.” You’re going to want to listen to this one. Bill, welcome to the Pipeliners Podcast.

Bill Herrington: Russel, it’s great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Russel: Listen, thank you for reaching out. Thank you for giving me a copy of your book, The Green Real Deal. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. I find what you’ve done interesting. Before we dive in, could you give us an introduction and tell us a little bit about how you got interested, involved with pipelines?

Bill: Sure. I had my first pipeline job when I was 18 years old. I was green as I could be, but I had a pipeline job in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I was just trying to pay for some college expenses, which I did, but then went on to LSU and got a degree in finance and worked in the banking industry for the next 35 years, in the energy business.

I became involved with lots of different things in the energy space. The whole narrative about transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy just didn’t make sense to me. I wanted to get to the truth, to the bottom of really what we could do.

I didn’t believe in the whole narrative of fossil fuels being bad for humanity and green energy is 100 percent good for humanity. I frankly just wanted to get to the bottom of it, and I think that I did

Russel: From a young pipeliner, to a long career in banking, to writing a book about the value of pipelines. That’s quite a journey, quite a transition.

Bill: I never would have drawn it up that way. I never thought that I’d be in this spot. I never had a desire to write a book, but this narrative bothered me so much. We’re going to transition to renewable energy and keep fossil fuels in the ground.

I was like, “Where in the world did this come from, and how did we get to this point?” I never thought that I would write a book, but here I am.

Russel: I’m glad you did, I’ll tell you. I think it’s really well done. I want to walk through the book a little bit, but I want to start with the history of pipelines. You talk about pipelines and their value to the war effort in World War II.

I’ve done a couple of episodes on history, but you really dive into the lab a lot deeper. Can you give us a background of when pipelines started becoming a really big deal, and how that relates to the World War II and the war effort?

Bill: Sure. The job that I had in Harrisburg, I didn’t know it at the time, but it was working on a pipeline that was built during World War II. What I didn’t know back then, which I know now after researching the book, is that the Allies consumed about seven billion barrels of oil during World War II.

At the time, most of that oil was produced in Texas. What they would do is load the oil on tankers, and it would go through the Gulf of Mexico, around Florida, up the eastern seaboard. During World War II, Hitler knew the importance of oil, so he started targeting the American tankers when they were shipping that oil to the northeast.

In fact, they even had a name for it in Germany. They called it the American shooting season. The Germans sank, I believe it was 74 tankers during that time period, and 5,000 seamen lost their lives. It was a critical time because everyone knew that you had to have oil to win this war.

We had to figure out a different way to move oil from Texas to the Northeast. This innovative approach came up of pipelining the oil from Texas all the way up through, I think it was 1,400 miles up to the northeast.

Russel: One of the things a lot of people don’t know about that is that most of the ports on the Texas coast, they’re shallow water, so they’re dredged. These tankers would go offshore in these dredged channels, and then turn to go wherever they’re going.

The submarines would just lay off the edge of these channels, and it was turkey shoot. It was really, really bad. It was just turkey shoot. Leaving from the East Coast, once they got these pipelines in place, they were leaving from deep water, and they could turn more quickly, which made it easier for them to get through that initial screen of submarines. It’s very interesting.

Bill: People don’t realize just how critical oil was in World War II. In fact, one of the quotes I have in my book, Patton prioritized oil over food. His quote was, “My men can eat their belts, but my tanks have got to have gas.” That stuck out to me.

Most people don’t realize that when they say, “Hey, keep fossil fuels in the ground.” They don’t really understand the implications of what they’re saying.

Russel: That’s very true. That is very true. Let’s move forward and let’s talk about the importance of nuclear power and how nuclear power plays into this whole history of pipelining.

Bill: Back to Harrisburg, again, this was in 1979. I’m old enough to remember and have experienced that. In March of ’79, the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island happened. While it wasn’t a big catastrophe, it was still the largest nuclear accident we had ever had in this country.

I went up there during that time, and it was very interesting, because the guys that I had to work with would not drink the water in Harrisburg. They would fill up their Igloo containers north of Harrisburg, and they’d come down. I was drinking water out of the hose. I didn’t know what they were doing.

I finally asked a guy after a week or two, I said, “What are you guys doing bringing those water jugs down here, those Igloo containers?” They said, “Man, we don’t drink the water here. It’s contaminated with the nuclear accident.” I said, “Wow.” It impacted that area.

Frankly, I, for almost 40 years, remembered that story, and I was anti-nuclear until I investigated what happened and how much energy we need in this country. I have turned the page with respect to that, and so I believe that nuclear needs a second chance in the country.

Russel: Also, one of the outcomes of the Three Mile Island is that it caused more power generation to move away from nuclear and to coal and natural gas. It’s a big part of the reason we have the maturity in our gas system in the US is because of Three Mile Island moving us away from nuclear power for electric power generation.

Bill: It’s interesting, too. I remember when Jane Fonda and the environmental activists were there protesting against nuclear. They had different chants that they would repeat. I remember one was, “Two, four, six, eight, we don’t want to radiate.”

The irony of Jane Fonda’s environmental activism is that she is the person, and the other activists there, that made us return to oil and gas. Now, in 2024, she’s one of the main activists against oil and gas, but she and her other cohorts were the ones that moved us to rely more on oil and gas.

Russel: Exactly. That’s exactly true. You spend a little time in your book talking about the history and the wisdom of the past, and then you talk about the flawed narrative of the present. There are several key factors going on there.

Could you walk us through how you view the flawed narrative? I’m particularly interested in how you went about researching this.

Bill: The first thing that captured my attention, and this was it in 2016. I was working in downtown Houston in the Wells Fargo building downtown. I heard these chants from inside the building. I’m like, “What in the world is going on?”

There are not a lot of protests in Houston, Texas, and so when one happens, it captures everybody’s attention. I walked down to Main Street to see what was going on. All of these people were piling out of vans and trucks and pulling these signs out and all these professionally made signs.

They were protesting in front of the energy transfer building, I believe it was. They were they were saying, “Fossil fuels, keep them in the ground.” They were protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline. I was interested in that because the protesters, the American Indians, were protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline claiming that it crossed their lands, that it threatened their water supply.

At the same time, I happened to be working on Something for another Indian tribe, and it was an oil and gas loan for that tribe. The irony of that struck me that one tribe of Indians was protesting oil and gas and the other one simultaneously was supporting oil and gas.

In fact, most people don’t realize this, but American Indians are some of the largest owners of oil and gas in the country. They even own their own pipelines and receive over a billion dollars a year in oil and gas royalties. The irony and maybe hypocrisy of the situation struck me. I was determined to get to the bottom of it.

I had to go through, in terms of research, there’s an awful lot of research in the book. We broke it down in terms of the original argument was that it crossed the Indian lands. The truth is the Dakota Access Pipeline doesn’t even cross the land for the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

I think it’s 15 to 20 miles above where the boundary of the tribe is. One of their principal arguments is that it crossed their land, and it doesn’t. The construction companies were very careful to go around their tribal land.

Russel: Interesting. You also talk about dark money. What is dark money in this context?

Bill: Dark money is a term that’s used by NGOs, which are basically politically active nonprofits. There’s a court case that came out in 2010. Dark money is not just used for environmental stuff. It’s used for a whole array of items in the country. Political contributions, for one, is a big part of it. You don’t know the source of the money.

These nonprofits can get money from all different sources, and they will provide it to a cause where they don’t want their name associated with it. For example, the Sierra Club, and there are all these different green groups, will get money and you can’t go through and determine where it actually came from.

I found that to be very interesting. Who is actually funding these people? When I saw the protests outside on the street, it was very clear that they had professionally made signs, that this was not a grassroots effort. It was a professional, well-organized protest that was not a grassroots operation.

Maybe I was naive, I thought that all protests started that way and were sustained that way, but I’ve learned that that’s not the case.

Russel: My personal experience with that started in the military. I was stationed in England on my second assignment in the Air Force and was involved with Greenham Common when the land launched cruise missiles.

That was quite an education between what I saw going on before the news cameras showed up, what happened when the news cameras showed up, and then what happened after the news cameras left, and realized that it was theater.

Bill: One of the interesting items that I researched here was the MHA Nation, which is a tribe probably 150 miles north of the Standing Rock Sioux. They’re some of the biggest producers of oil and gas in the country. They literally sit on top of pipelines.

What I learned is it’s about the money, who has the production, who has the oil and gas, and who doesn’t. If you look at what the Indians are complaining about, what they chiefly object to is not having control of the things over their land, which I get. I’m not objecting to that. They’re using a protest against oil and gas to get what they really want.

Russel: That’s right. When I was in the military, which was back in the ’80s, it was not long after the Three Mile Island issue. There was a lot of concern at that time about nuke power, and nuke weapons, and all that. I got a lot of classified briefings about the opposition and where their money came from.

There’s always loyal opposition with valid points that are there, but their messages get amplified and modified because of the money.

Bill: That’s right.

Russel: You have to look at the money, and where is it coming from, and what is their interest? What outcome are they looking for?

Bill: Who’s getting the money, and who’s not getting the money? [laughs]

Russel: Exactly. Follow the money. Again, I want to ask you to elaborate a little bit on Russia’s master manipulation. This serves up the whole, what is the geopolitical reality of oil and gas?

Bill: True.

Russel: Not what’s the international green narrative, but what is the geopolitical reality of oil and gas?

Bill: We’ve both been in oil and gas for a long time. If you remember the discussions in the early 2000s before fracking, they talked about the era of peak oil and gas, the theoretical maximum of production of oil and gas. Then, fracking occurred.

I pinpointed around 2008 when Mitchell Energy basically pioneered horizontal fracking. We went from thinking that we were going to be short natural gas and constructing natural gas import facilities, LNG import facilities, and then we went to an era of excess natural gas because of fracking. We were now swimming in natural gas.

If you think back on the early period of the LNG era where we were going to import natural gas. Russia sits on one of the world’s largest reserves of natural gas. They are fully expected to export natural gas to the United States. They wouldn’t have complained about LNG. They wouldn’t have complained about natural gas because they wanted another customer.

Remember that Russia’s economy is probably 50 percent based on oil and gas. Some people call it “The Big Gas Station.” It’s in their economic incentive in order to have more customers where they can export that oil and gas.

Russel: Yes, I have a premise. I think that there is a lot going on by the Russians and by the Chinese to manipulate America’s ability to produce and export oil and gas. Because it limits their influence, because they control a big part of the supply.

Bill: Absolutely. If you think about Russia, Russia, they never believed that we would have become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas again. They thought that we were on a decline. After fracking, then it became apparent to them that they didn’t realize what a threat fracking was to their basic industry.

Instead of being a supplier of natural gas to the United States, they became threatened because of the exporting of natural gas to their main customers in Europe. This is a huge threat to Russia, our ability to frack and produce natural gas, and to ship LNG to our friends in Europe.

Russel: Absolutely. You’ve got a whole chapter in here about green technologies and how green isn’t really green. I’m not going to unpack that, because most of our listeners are already aware of it, but walk us through, if you would, what do you think the path forward is?

What is the energy world going to look like in the US and internationally over the next 5-10 years? What’s your perspective on that?

Bill: The first thing that I learned is that there’s no way we’re going to be able to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Fossil fuels will be here for many, many years. There’s 6,000 products that are produced by fossil fuels.

There’s a great author, professor, named Smil. He has a book called “How the World Really Works.” He talks about the four things that are needed for a modern society. That’s steel, cement, plastics, and ammonia. All of those require fossil fuels. They’re critical for our economy. It’s not going to go away.

We just need to also remember the lessons of World War II. It has to be there in order for us to protect ourselves and our friends and democracy. That would be number one, that fossil fuels and the pipelines that move them, they’re critical to our economy. They’re to the country. They’re critical to our military and to our friends.

The second thing I would say is that the green movement has spawned all kinds of other very strange things. One of the things that I picked up in the book, Russel, was these wood pellets. In Europe, they don’t want to burn coal. What they decided to do is burn wood pellets because wood is theoretically renewable. Because a tree can regrow.

Wood pellets, in Europe, is a big deal. What companies are doing is chopping down trees in the United States. Millions of acres in the southeastern United States have been devastated by these companies that are producing wood pellets.

They take these pellets. They ship them to Europe. They burn the wood pellets. It’s a travesty, really, what’s happened to American forests. That is happening now. I think that that’s something that really needs to be addressed.

The third is renewables — when I say renewables, it’s solar and wind — it is going to grow. There’s no doubt about that because we put the money and the politics behind that. We need to be sensible about how much it’s actually going to generate in energy for the country.

The amount of land that’s consumed by solar and wind is just staggering. One of the quotes that I mention in the book is that if you were to replace fossil fuels and nuclear with renewable energy, it would consume over 270 million acres of land. If you were to do that — of course, we’re not — you’d have to clear or pave or repurpose 30,000 acres per day.

While renewables are going to grow, we have to be realistic about where we put that and how much energy it’s going to generate. The solar on the tops of parking lots, and buildings, and homes, and rooftops, all of that’s very reasonable, but it’s not going to be anywhere near sufficient to power this country.

I do think we need to make coal cleaner and to move to natural gas where we can. I do believe that’s important. Coal, it’s cheap, it’s abundant, it can be easily transported, and coal is not going away either. I do think there’s an obligation on all of us to make it as clean as we can, but to support converting it to natural gas where we can as well.

I do think the last thing that I mentioned was I believe nuclear needs a second chance in the country. I would never have thought that I would have believed that when I started writing this book. It’s the cleanest and most powerful form of energy known to man.

There’s new technology out there, these small modular reactors, which don’t require an outside water source in order to cool down in the event of an accident. They use molten salt to cool it. There’s a lot of innovation in that category.

With all of the energy that we need in this country, and especially with the new AI and all the data centers that are required, they consume huge amounts of energy. I don’t see how our country can get there without giving nuclear a second chance with the newer technology that’s out there.

Russel: I agree with everything you’re saying there, absolutely. I frankly wish that if the environmentalists would be more concerned about footprint than content, if that makes sense. The thing about solar and wind is they have huge footprints.

There are hundreds and thousands of these wind farms along the Texas coast coming from Brownsville up past Corpus Christi, and they have the same thing on the West Coast. I think that all those wind turbines are changing climate.

They’re pulling the energy out of the air and consequently causing the moisture to not go as far inland, and that’s causing droughts. I have no data to base that on, so I’ll just say that’s me making something up, but that’s a thesis worth exploring and understanding.

Bill: There are going to be so many unintended consequences from the wind and solar. I think in certainly 25 years, we’re going to look back on this era when we said we could move to solar and wind and people are going to think, “How absurd was that idea?

“How in the world would people think that you could consume that much land and move to intermittent energy that’s not dispatchable? You’ve got to have energy when you need it.” The quote that I like is, energy is like oxygen, it’s not OK to have it 99 percent of the time.

In this country, can you imagine having energy that is intermittent and you can’t feed people, you can’t heat homes, you can’t deliver food on time, food spoilage. It’s just amazing. I believe it’s only a matter of time before people look back and say, “What in the world were people thinking when they believed that we could convert to solar and wind?”

Russel: There’s going to be a lot of people, too, that are driving around parts of the country and looking at all these concrete foundations for these wind farms and wondering, “How the heck do we clean that mess up?”

Bill: Windmills, I think most of your listeners know, but they only last 20 to 25 years. There’s no good way to dispose of them. A lot of times, you’ll see them in landfills, they get buried. The solar panels, while we’re cutting down our trees and shipping wood pellets to Europe, we’re also ordering solar panels from China.

They get the jobs, they’re making the solar panels, and then shipping it here. The absurdity of all of this was just too much. I think it’s turning, Russel. I believe the narrative is turning, which is a good thing, but it can’t happen too fast. I can tell you that.

Russel: I concur. I will say this, I think there is a lot more common ground between the environmentalists and the energy businesses and energy advocates. There’s a lot more common ground than what people will realize, and the rhetoric gets in the way.

As we wrap this up, Bill, what I’d like you to do is walk us through your five tenets for a path forward. The title of your book is “The Green Real Deal.” How do we move into a sensible green future?

Bill: I thought a lot about that title, and people were like, “How did you come up with that title?” I wanted to be objective about this. One of the other alternative titles was The Green Raw Deal, but I was afraid that people would think that I came into writing this book with a bias, and I did not.

I wanted to know the truth of it. I wanted to know what a good solution for the country would be. I’m repeating myself a little bit, but fossil fuels are going to be important to our economy. This whole attack on fossil fuels and pipelines is so counterintuitive, and it’s harmful to the country that that stuff needs to stop.

More people need to communicate just how important this is to our country. We need to support fossil fuels. We need to understand that natural gas is a gift to the country. That is what’s going to make us competitive with the rest of the world, especially China, which has now got a no-limits partnership with Russia.

Russia is supplying them with energy, and China has their manufacturing. Their partnership is going to be extremely strong. We need to also be strong, and that means that we need to have all sources of energy, including fossil fuels. Again, we need to protect our forests.

We need to sensibly expand renewables, but realize that that’s not the long-term solution for us. I do think we need to use our natural gas. Again, it’s a gift to the country. Where we can, we need to convert coal to natural gas. I do think we ought to make coal cleaner, but that will be very difficult.

The rest of the world is using dung and wood to heat their homes. They’re going to need coal, and where they can, they can use natural gas. That’s going to take a very long time. The fifth is we’re going to need nuclear. There’s no way around it.

The amount of energy that these data centers are consuming, some of them consume as much as small cities, maybe even large cities. Where’s that power going to come from? It’s not going to come from solar and wind. The only solution is nuclear.

Russel: Solar and wind are too intermittent to power these kind of facilities. It’s completely not cost-prohibitive, but operationally not feasible.

Bill: Right. The era of the big giant nuclear plants, maybe that’s over, but these smaller modular nuclear reactors, there are a number of companies that are investigating that. I do think that that’s going to be a big part of the future.

Russel: I think that small compact nuclear reactors is a very high probability. There’s a lot of opportunity there for sure.

Bill: I agree with you on that.

Russel: Look, Bill, great to have you. The name of the book is The Green Real Deal by Bill Harrington. You can get it on Amazon and such. If you want to find it through the website, you can go pipelinepodcastnetwork.com and look up this episode, and you will find the link to buy the book.

I recommend you read it. It’s a great read. It’s full of photographs, and facts, and pictures, and makes it easy to understand a huge amount of information. Bill, it’s real clear to me in reading your book you spent a ton of time methodically and comprehensively putting the research together to draw your conclusions and to make your arguments.

Thank you for coming on, and thank you for being an advocate for pipeliners.

Bill: Russel, thank you very much for having me. It was great to be here. Thank you very much. I enjoyed this very much.

Russel: I hope you enjoyed this week’s episode of the “Pipeliners Podcast” and our conversation with Bill. Just a reminder before you go, you should register to win our customized Pipeliners Podcast YETI tumbler. Simply visit pipelinepodcastnetwork.com/win and enter yourself in the drawing.

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Russel: If you’d like to support the podcast, the best way to do that is to leave a review. You can do that on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Spotify, wherever you happen to listen. If you have ideas, questions, or topics you’d be interested in, please let me know on the Contact Us page at pipelinepodcastnetwork.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks for listening. I’ll talk to you next week.

Categories: Pipeline History, Pipeline Industry, Pipeliners Podcast, Podcast