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AM Briefing: Exxon’s Plastic Counterattack
On uranium challenges, Cadillac’s EV dreams, and a firefighter’s firestorm
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On uranium challenges, Cadillac’s EV dreams, and a firefighter’s firestorm
On Trump’s latest wind target, new critical minerals, and methane maps
On GOP lockstep on renewables, a wind win, and EPA’s battery bashing
On Interior’s birdwatching, China’s lithium slowdown, and recycling aluminum
On residential solar dims, New Jersey makes history, and Brazil’s challenge
On abandoning Antarctica, an EV milestone, and this week’s big earnings
On Fervo’s megadeal tease, steel’s coal gamble, and Norway’s CO2 milestone
Current conditions: Manila is facing severe flooding amid days of monsoon rains • Of the seven Marshall Islands that the U.S. Drought Monitor tracks, two are currently suffering extreme drought, and another three are under severe drought conditions • Wildfires are blazing in Oregon, where the Cram Fire has already scorched nearly 100,000 acres just 50 miles south of Portland.
OpenAI CEO Sam AltmanKevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Six months after the top executives of OpenAI and Softbank stood shoulder to shoulder at the White House to announce a $500 billion joint venture to build out the infrastructure for artificial intelligence across the United States, the so-called Stargate project has yet to complete a deal for a single data center. The companies promised in January to “immediately” invest $100 billion. But in a sign of the dialed-back ambitions, the project is now targeting the more modest goal of constructing one small data center by the end of this year, likely in Ohio, The Wall Street Journal reported.
That’s bad news for the power companies that have lavished in the projected demand from data centers. Crusoe Energy, a developer of gas- and renewable-powered data centers, boasted earlier this year that it was “pouring concrete at three in the morning” to build out its portions of the Stargate project at “ludicrous speed,” Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported in March. Over the course of just one month this spring, Morgan Stanley ratcheted up its estimates for capital expenditures in cloud computing this year by a whopping $29 billion, to $392 billion, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin reported in May. Perhaps that’s another AI hallucination.
Fervo Energy’s breakthrough in harnessing fracking technology to tap into the Earth’s molten heat in far more places than ever before effectively launched the next-generation geothermal industry in the U.S. Now the Houston-headquartered startup is poised to vault “enhanced” geothermal power into a gigawatt-scale electricity source.
In a Monday post on LinkedIn, Fervo CEO Tim Latimer teased a “multi-GW development deal” currently in the works. He promised “more to come on this soon.” He did not respond to my inquiry Monday night. The company already has a deal for a 500-megawatt project called Cape Station in Utah, for which it netted a $206 million investment last month. But a project several times that size would put next-generation geothermal in the big leagues with nuclear power as a potential source of large-scale, baseload power.
Shares of Cleveland-Cliffs soared nearly 13% on Monday afternoon after the steelmaker said President Donald Trump’s tariffs had boosted demand. The company’s second-quarter earnings bested estimates, thanks to cost cutting and record steel shipments. CEO Lourenco Goncalves even suggested the company could sell parts of itself in the wake of Japanese steelmaker Nippon Steel’s megadeal to take over American rival U.S. Steel. He confirmed “active conversations” to sell non-core assets but said “everything else is possible.”
On the call, Goncalves also suggested the administration’s embrace of coal had improved market conditions for the company. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reported, the chief executive confirmed that Cleveland-Cliffs would abandon its landmark green steel project because the hydrogen it needed was not available widely enough. Instead, Goncalves said, the company would revamp the project “in a way that we preserve and enhance Middletown using beautiful coal, beautiful coke.”
The chief executive of the largest natural gas company in the U.S. is urging Congress to overhaul energy permitting or risk losing the AI race to China. In an interview with the Financial Times, EQT CEO Toby Rice said, “The threat of not getting infrastructure built has only gotten larger — not only from bad actors getting rich by selling energy that could be replaced with American energy — it’s also the threat of China winning the AI race.” Specifically, he called on lawmakers to end what’s called “judicial review,” a period of six years during which opponents of a project can challenge the federal permits in court.
The U.S. has come to the cusp of easing federal permitting for years. After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Democrats tried to ease permitting rules but faced opposition from progressives and conservationists who deemed any relaxing of regulations that could benefit fossil fuels a nonstarter. Democrats tried to revive the issue last year, but Republicans walked away from the negotiations once the election turned in the GOP’s favor. With the One Big Beautiful Bill revoking many of Democrats’ energy priorities, it’s unclear how much leverage Republicans have to restart talks ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
The world’s first carbon shipping terminal designed to permanently store captured CO2 that would have otherwise gone into the atmosphere just took its first shipment, The Washington Post reported. Located on an island on the edge of the North Sea, Norway’s Northern Lights facility accepted 7,500 metric tons of liquefied CO2 from a Norwegian cement factory. The plant — funded by the government in Oslo and fossil fuel companies — could serve as Europe’s primary carbon dump, and as a model for Asian countries looking to establish their own storage facilities.
China’s exports of clean-energy technologies such as solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles shaved 1% of the global emissions outside China last year, a new Carbon Brief analysis found.
On the NRC, energy in Pennsylvania, and Meta AI
Current conditions: Air quality alerts will remain in place in Chicago through Tuesday evening due to smoke from Canadian wildfires • There is a high risk of a tropical depression forming in the Gulf this week • The rain is clearing on the eastern seaboard after 2.64 inches fell in New York’s Central Park on Monday, breaking the record for July 14 set in 1908.
The Trump administration is putting pressure on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “rubber stamp” all new reactors, Politico reports based on conversations with three people at the May meeting where the expectation was relayed. The directive to the NRC’s top staff came from Adam Blake, a representative of the Department of Government Efficiency, who apparently used the term “rubber stamp” specifically to describe the function of the independent agency. NRC’s “secondary assessment” of the safety of new nuclear projects would be a “foregone conclusion” following approval by the Department of Energy or the Pentagon, NRC officials were made to believe, per Politico.
A spokesperson for the NRC pointed to President Trump’s recent executive order aiming to quadruple U.S. nuclear power by 2050 in response to Politico’s reporting. Skeptics, however, have expressed concern over the White House’s influence on the NRC, which is meant to operate independently, as well as potential safety lapses that might result from the 18-month deadline for reviewing new reactors established in the order.
President Trump and Republican Senator Dave McCormick of Pennsylvania will announce a $70 million “AI and energy investment” in the Keystone State at the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit today in Pittsburgh. The event is meant to focus on the development of emerging energy technologies. Organizers said that more than 60 CEOs, including executives from ExxonMobil, Chevron, BlackRock, and Palantir, will be in attendance at the event hosted by Carnegie Mellon University. BlackRock is expected to announce a $25 billion investment in a “data-center and energy infrastructure development in Northeast Pennsylvania, along with a joint venture for increased power generation” at the event, Axios reports.
Ahead of the summit, critics slammed the event as a “moral failure,” with student protests expected throughout the day. Paulina Jaramillo, a professor of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon, wrote on Bluesky that the summit was a “slap in the face to real clean energy researchers,” and that there is “nothing innovative about propping up the fossil fuel industry.” “History will judge institutions that chose short-term gain over moral clarity during this critical moment for climate action and scientific integrity,” she went on.
On Monday, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed on Threads that the company aims to become “the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online” — an ambitious goal that will require the extensive development of new gas infrastructure, my colleague Matthew Zeitlin reports. The first gigawatt-level project, an Ohio data center called Prometheus, will be powered by Meta’s own natural gas infrastructure, with the natural gas company Williams reportedly building two 200-megawatt facilities for the project in Ohio. The buildout for Prometheus is in addition to another Meta project in Northeast Louisiana, Hyperion, that Zuckerberg said Monday could eventually be as large as 5 gigawatts. “To get a sense of the scale we’re talking about, a new, large nuclear reactor has about a gigawatt of capacity, while a newly built natural gas plant could supply only around 500 megawatts,” Matthew writes. Read his full report here.
BYD
Electric vehicle sales are currently on track to outpace gasoline car sales in China this year, Bloomberg reports. In the first six months of 2025, new battery-electric, plug-in hybrid, and extended-range electric cars accounted for 5.5 million vehicles sold in the country (compared to 5.4 million sales of new gasoline cars), and are projected to top 16 million before the end of December — both of which put EVs a hair over their combustion-powered competitors.
By contrast, battery-electric cars only accounted for 28% of new-car sales in China last year, per the nation’s Passenger Car Association. But “sales this year have been spurred by the extension of a trade-in subsidy” as well as the nation’s expansive electrified lineup, including “several budget options” like BYD’s Seagull, Bloomberg writes. “China is the only large market where EVs are on average cheaper to buy than comparable combustion cars,” BloombergNEF reported last month.
Window heat pumps are an extremely promising answer to the conundrum of decarbonizing large apartment buildings, a new report by the nonprofit American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy has found. Previously, research on heat pumps had primarily focused on their advantages for single-family homes, while the process of retrofitting larger steam- and hot-water-heated apartment buildings remained difficult and expensive, my colleague Emily Pontecorvo explains. But while apartment residents used to have to wait for their building to either install a large central heat pump system for the whole structure, or else rely on a more involved “mini-split” system, newer technologies like window heat pumps proved to be one of the most cost-effective solutions in ACEEE’s report with an average installation cost of $9,300 per apartment. “That’s significantly higher than the estimated $1,200 per apartment cost of a new boiler, but much lower than the $14,000 to $20,000 per apartment price tag of the other heat pump variations,” Emily writes, adding that the report also found window heat pumps may be “the cheapest to operate, with a life cycle cost of about $14,500, compared to $22,000 to $30,000 for boilers using biodiesel or biogas or other heat pump options.” Read Emily’s full report here.
California was powered by two-thirds clean energy in 2023 — the latest year data is available — making it the “largest economy in the world to achieve this milestone,” Governor Gavin Newsom’s office announced this week.