Peter Huntsman Testifies Before U.S. Senate on Energy Policy and AI Electricity

Well, so many of these commitments have a longer-term objective. We're going to be carbon-free by 2050 and so forth. You'd be shocked at the number of CEOs I've spoken to that have said, I don't have to worry about that. I won't be around. I can make the commitment today, but I'm not going to be around then. There is no viable path when you look at it on a global basis. When you look at just replacing hydrocarbons with renewables, again, renewables have a very important role to play in certain areas, in certain fields. We make the raw materials that go into the wind blades and solar panels and so forth. I'm not anti any of that. I want to be very clear on that. But as far as the reliable, the reason why you're building gas turbines, it's because you don't have the reliability. Nobody knows a week from today if wind turbines are going to be turning or not. Nobody knows exactly how much power you're going to be getting out of solar panels a week from today. They can tell you what you're going to be getting out of a gas turbine. So, I'm more concerned about the today and how we get to the issues of today and how we get to the issues over the next five or 10 years because that'll dictate where we are in 2040 and 2050. And coming up with unrealistic goals that we just hope that eventually we'll come up with some means or some mechanism just isn't, it's not plausible and it's not realistic. That's what we're seeing in Europe.

My question is just simply this. From the standpoint of can you talk about the dangers of retiring all fossil fuels whether it be gas or coal or whatever. Can you talk about where we would be in this country today if we just decide, okay, that's what we're going to try to do.

National suicide.

I may have to wait three to five years for the EPA to approve a new chemistry. And that's simply not acceptable when you look at what we're doing with AI and what we're doing with material sciences. So, you're spot on.

What would be great if the EPA would follow the laws that all of you passed creating TSCA, which is they have 90 days to approve a product or not. Right now, we have products that have been waiting for three to four years to get approval. I can build a facility in China in less time than that. If you're going to be building these composite materials, you're better off going someplace other than the United States because it takes so long.

That's right.

We're ready to go.

I'm not an AI producer. I'm from the chemical industry. But if I've got a trillion-dollar balance sheet, I'm always going to be able to afford the power. That's not a concern to me. If he's got a billion-dollar balance sheet, he comes behind me. And if he's got a thousand-dollar balance sheet, like the average household in America, guess who's going to pay the highest price and guess who's going to get the incremental last bit of electricity? And that's the way it's going to work. It's a pyramid. And so if you can afford it, and what we need to be doing is, you're absolutely right, we need to be building out the base load power, which has got to come back to natural gas. That's going to be the cleanest, it's the fastest, it's the most economical means of having a reliable base load across the board. And that's from our industry because we don't have a trillion-dollar balance sheet. We've been through Europe. We've been through all these continents that have tried seven different ways of making electrons and they're virtually bankrupt. Doesn't work. We know it. It's not a theory. Doesn't work.