A Trio of Powerful Storms Slam into North America

Current conditions: Japan is bracing for two major storms as Typhoon Nolo and the newly formed Typhoon Koguma barrel toward the country • A brief heat wave in Chicago is driving temperatures up past 85 degrees Fahrenheit today • It’s a sunny day in San Salvador Island, where the Genoan explorer Christopher Columbus first set foot in the Americas exactly 534 years ago today, when the indigenous Lucayan people called the smallest inhabited part of the Bahamas “Guanahani.”

THE TOP FIVE

1. A trio of powerful storms slam into North America

In the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Isaias plunged thousands along the Alabama and Florida coastlines into darkness and left at least four dead. In the Pacific off Southern California, Tropical Storm Rachel stirred a surf that badly battered Long Beach’s iconic boardwalk. Further south in the eastern Pacific, Hurricane Simon pounded Mexico’s west coast as a Category 4 storm with sustained winds topping 150 miles per hour. Isaias, the only one of the tempête a trois in the Atlantic, forced nearly two-thirds of U.S. oil and gas production in the Gulf offline, as I told you last week.

The storm threatened to put further pressure on the fuel market as refineries went on pause. But in a post on his Truth Social platform Friday, President Donald Trump announced a surprise deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin to lift Moscow’s restrictions on diesel exports and release nearly 2 million tons of the fuel onto the market. “This is a very big and important announcement,” he wrote. On Sunday, the U.S. president posted another update that, “effectively immediate, there is an ENERGY CEASEFIRE” in the war between Russia and Ukraine, insisting “both parties have agreed.” Whether that holds longer than the last so-called energy ceasefire Trump claimed to have brokered between the two sides remains to be seen. Either way, it didn’t stop the Houthis from twice striking the main airport in Riyadh over the weekend, killing at least a dozen and injuring hundreds amid an oil industry summit in the Saudi capital, the Saudi Arabia-based Arab News reported.

2. A House climate hawk sees permitting reform’s defenders as a ‘red flag’

Representative Jared Huffman, a progressive climate hawk from California, wants you to know that he sees your breathless defenses of the bipartisan permitting reform bill and considers them a red flag. “It’s going to be very interesting for everyone to take stock after this election and think about what it means,” he told my colleague Jael Holzman in an interview we published this morning. “I was immediately attacked by right-wing Twitter and some of the boosters of this deal for simply saying, let’s see how this election goes. To me, that’s common sense! And no one is going to vote on this until after the election, anyway! The hypersensitivity tells you something.”

When Jael asked what, exactly, it tells him, he responded: “There’s this choreographed attempt to preemptively flood the zone and prevent any kind of serious scrutiny about this. I think it should be a red flag for my colleagues and serious policymakers to have an attempt to shut down serious scrutiny and debate, or pretend there’ll never be another deal and this one can never be improved, and that it’s now or never or nothing. That’s just fishy and not intellectually honest.”

3. Exclusive: Automakers are propping up demand for Europe’s coal-fired steel, report shows

After construction, automakers buy the most steel of any industry. That makes car companies key factors in how eagerly steelmakers decarbonize. In January, research by the climate advocacy group Mighty Earth concluded that roughly 60% of primary steel made in the U.S. went to automakers who had promised to support greener steel but remained top customers for the metal made from coal-fired blast furnaces. Now the group is out with a new analysis on the European Union, shared exclusively with me for this newsletter, that traced purchases of coal from blast furnaces in France, Spain, Germany, and Italy to vehicles made by Ford, General Motors, Honda, Stellantis, Tata Motors, Toyota, and Volkswagen.

“We always talk about how Europe is leading the charge on green steel, which is true,” Matthew Groch, the senior director of decarbonization at Mighty Earth, told me. “But when you are looking at where these auto companies are being ranked, Europe is still falling behind.” The report proved more challenging than the U.S.-based research given that, in the EU, “it’s a little tougher because, with the common market, they don’t track the actual shipments like we were able to do with anything coming into the U.S.” Still, he said, the team was able to track the commercial relationships through things such as awards given out for “supplier of the year.” What the report ultimately suggests is that advocates of greener steel should seek to pressure shareholders in major automakers on both sides of the Atlantic to clean up their supply chains to spur more demand for lower-carbon materials.

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4. Kazakhstan’s uranium giant approves a Chinese deal and rejects a Russia one

An old uranium mine in Stepnogorsk, Kazakhstan. Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images

Long one of the world’s top producers of uranium, Kazakhstan faced a choice with major geopolitical implications earlier this year when the Central Asian giant selected bids to build its first nuclear power station. Astana split the difference between its two powerful neighbors, inking a deal for a Chinese nuclear plant in February and another for a Russian atomic power station in March. The shareholders of the state-owned Kazatomprom, Kazakhstan’s state nuclear and uranium company, are proving less diplomatic. The firm’s stockholders voted by nearly 89% to approve a deal to supply uranium to China’s State Nuclear Uranium Resource Development Company, according to an official tally on Kazatomprom’s website. At the same general meeting, which NucNet called “extraordinary,” a deal to supply Russia’s Uranium One died with roughly 88% abstaining.

Kazakhstan has drawn unprecedented distance between itself and Moscow since the start of the Ukraine war, which Astana refused to back even though the Kremlin had helped quell domestic unrest in its Central Asian neighbor just weeks before the 2022 invasion. Beyond increased investment from China, Kazakhstan has attracted more interest from the United States, as critical mineral prospectors such as Cove Capital look to expand across the region.

5. China tees up two historic firsts for green hydrogen

China ramped up investments in hydrogen and its derivative products, such as green methanol and ammonia, late last year when the central government opened its budget for the first time to directly subsidizing an industry hitherto left to the provinces. The timing proved prescient as the Iran War put the squeeze on China’s crude imports and further accelerated the shift toward more domestic electricity-based resources. Two stories over the weekend show just how swiftly progress is underway. On Friday, Hydrogen Insight reported that the world’s first green ammonia-powered dry bulk vessel had set sail on its maiden voyage from a shipyard in China to Australia. Then, on Sunday, China Hydrogen Bulletin, a newsletter written by analyst Jian Wu, highlighted that China’s first long-distance pipeline dedicated to green hydrogen was approaching its first trial run.

THE KICKER

Four-hour stage compares very well to open-cycle gas turbines, labeled OCGT. Wood Mackenzie

In markets with a lot of wind and solar, there tends to be a lot of gas to serve as backup and keep the lights on when the weather can’t. But batteries are rapidly getting cheaper. Four-hour battery storage is now less expensive than open-cycle gas turbines in all 43 markets where both technologies were modeled, according to a new Wood Mackenzie analysis published last week. “This economic shift is decisive and widening,” Ahmed Jameel Abdullah, principal analyst at Wood Mackenzie, said in a statement. “Gas turbine shortages and rising fuel volatility are driving up peaking costs, while expanding battery manufacturing continues to push storage costs down.” A word of caution: The report is comparing levelized cost of energy, a metric that — while popular — has some real problems, as my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last year.