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Posted by satis
Mar 1, 2026 at 05:32 PM
I understand the gut-based anxiety but the math is off.
Texas produced roughly 34.4 Bcf/day (~12,556 Bcf/year) of natural gas in 2025. A 600 MW gas plant running flat out all year would consume about 46 Bcf/year, roughly 0.37% of Texas production, not 2%. Even if you assume the three major projects all run at their full theoretical gas capacity simultaneously:
Nexus (Hubbard) – 600 MW: ~46 Bcf (~0.4%)
Fermi (Amarillo) – 6 GW gas approved: ~464 Bcf (~3.7%)
GW Ranch (Pecos County) – 7.65 GW: ~591 Bcf (~4.7%)
Combined, that’s under 9% of Texas annual not nearly half. And that assumes continuous full-capacity operation, which is rather unlikely. So the gas-consumption premise driving the broader collapse argument doesn’t hold up.
On the investing side crashes absolutely happen (and people should expect them, along with recesssions) but note that the 2008 crash recovered from its *peak* in 5–6 years. The bigger risk for most people isn’t a crash; it’s trying to time exits and re-entries based on fear. People are terrible at market timing. And people shouldn’t expect the stock market to be perfectly safe (though medium- and long-term it has proven to be… so far).
Single-stock volatility doesn’t imply systemic collapse. Oracle stock surged then dropped sharply on a single contract loss (actually it was a combination of things including a weak earnings guidance and soaring AI costs as well), but today it’s just past where it was a year previous. That’s volatility, not structural collapse.
Tech cycles often overbuild (fiber in 2000 is a good example whch I’ve used on this site). Some firms fail, but infrastructure remains and becomes cheaper and more productive. Bankruptcies don’t automatically equal economic collapse. The dot-com telecom collapse of 2000–2002 produced one of history’s greatest accidental infrastructure gifts: a planet-spanning fiber network built at enormous cost, left largely unused after bankruptcy, and ultimately repurposed to power the modern internet, cloud computing, and AI.
Posted by Amontillado
Mar 1, 2026 at 07:59 PM
Arg. You’re right. In my defense, I didn’t use a calculator and slipped a few decimal places.
Many thanks for the correction.
Unless I goofed again, Hubbard will still burn 158 billion cubic meters of gas per year, assuming they are generating the full 600 MW. I don’t know if 600 MW is the expected load or the designed generating capacity.
Seems a poor use of natural resources either way.