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Zanskar's drilling site in northern Nevada. Zanskar
Geothermal startups had a big day on Wednesday. Zanskar, a company that’s using artificial intelligence to find untapped conventional geothermal resources, raised $115 million in a Series C round. The Salt Lake City-based company — which experts in Heatmap's Insider Survey identified as one of the most promising climate tech startups operating today — is looking to build its first power plants. “With this funding, we have a six power plant execution plan ahead of us in the next three, four years,” Diego D’Sola, Zanskar’s head of finance, told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham. This, he estimates, will generate over $100 million of revenue by the end of the decade, and “unlock a multi-gigawatt pipeline behind that.”
Later on Tuesday, Sage Geosystems, a next-generation geothermal startup using fracking technology to harness the Earth’s heat for energy in places that don’t have conventional resources, announced it had raised $97 million in a Series B. The financing rounds highlight the growing excitement over geothermal energy. If you want a refresher on how it works, Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin has a sharp explainer here.
Stegra, the Swedish startup racing to build the world’s first large green steel mill near the Arctic Circle, has recently faced troubles as project costs and delays forced the company to raise over $1 billion in new financing. But last week, Stegra landed a major new customer, marking what Canary Media called “a step forward for the beleaguered project.” A subsidiary of the German industrial giant Thyssenkrupp agreed to buy a certain type of steel from Stegra’s plant, which is set to start operations next year. Thyssenkrupp Materials Services said it would buy tonnages in the “high-six-digit range” of “non-prime” steel, a version of the metal that doesn’t meet the high standards for certain uses but remains strong and durable enough for other industrial applications.
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For years, Tesla’s mission statement has captured its focus on building electric vehicles, solar panels, and batteries: “Accelerating the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” Now, however, billionaire Elon Musk’s manufacturing giant has broadened its pitch. The company’s new mission statement, announced on X, reads: “Building a world of amazing abundance.” The change reflects a wider shift in the cultural discourse around the transition to new energy and transportation technologies. Even experts polled in our Insiders Survey want to ditch “climate change” as a term. The fatigue was striking coming from the very scientists, policymakers, and activists working to defend against the effects of human-caused temperature rise and decarbonize the global economy.That dynamic has fueled the push to refocus rhetoric on the promise of cheaper, more efficient, and more abundant technological luxuries — a concept Tesla appears to be tapping into now. It may be time for a change. As Matthew wrote in September, Tesla’s market share hit an all-time low last year.
In yesterday’s newsletter, I told you that the Tokyo Electric Power Company had delayed the restart of the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power station in western Japan over an alarm malfunction. It wasn’t immediately clear how quickly Japan’s state-owned utility would clear up the issue. It turns out, pretty quickly. The pause lasted just 24 hours before Tepco brought Unit 6 of the seven-reactor facility back online, NucNet reported.
Things are getting steamy in the frigid waters of Alaska’s Bristol Bay. New research from Florida Atlantic University’s Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute found that a small population of beluga whales survive the long haul by mating with multiple partners over several years. It’s not just the males finding multiple female partners, as is the case with some other mammals. The study found that both males and females mated with multiple partners over several years. “What makes this study so thrilling is that it upends our long-standing assumptions about this Arctic species,” Greg O’Corry-Crowe, the research professor who authored the study, said in a press release. “It’s a striking reminder that female choice can be just as influential in shaping reproductive success as the often-highlighted battles of male-male competition. Such strategies highlight the subtle, yet powerful ways in which females exert control over the next generation, shaping the evolutionary trajectory of the species.”
Last month, the environmental news site Public Domain broke a big story: Karen Budd-Falen, the No. 3 official at the Department of the Interior, has extensive financial ties to the controversial Thacker Pass lithium mine in northern Nevada that the Trump administration is pushing to fast track. Now The New York Times is reporting that House Democrats are urging the Interior Department’s inspector general to open an investigation into the multimillion-dollar relationship Budd-Falen’s husband has with the mine’s developer. Frank Falen, her husband, sold water from a family ranch in northern Nevada to the subsidiary of Lithium Americas for $3.5 million in 2019, but the bulk of the money from the sale depended on permit approval for the project. Budd-Falen did not reveal the financial arrangement on any of her four financial disclosures submitted to the federal government when she worked for the Interior Department during President Donald Trump’s first term from 2018 to 2021.
House Republicans, meanwhile, are planning to vote this week to undo Biden-era restrictions on mining near more than a million acres of Minnesota wilderness. “Mining is huge in Minnesota. And all mining helps the school trust fund in Minnesota as well. So it benefits all schools in the state,” Representative Pete Stauber, a Minnesota Republican and the chair of the Natural Resources Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, said of the rule-killing bill he sponsored. While the vote is expected to draw blowback from environmentalists, E&E News noted that it could also agitate proceduralists who oppose the GOP’s continued “use of the rule-busting Congressional Review Act for actions that have not been traditionally seen as rules.” Still, the move is likely to fuel the dealmaking boom for critical minerals. As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham wrote in September, “everybody wants to invest” in startups promising to mine and refine the metals over which China has a near monopoly.
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A new United Nations report declares that the world has entered an era of “global water bankruptcy,” putting billions of people at risk. In an interview with The Guardian, Kaveh Madani, the report’s lead author, said that while not every basin and country is directly at risk, trade and migration are set to face calamity from water shortages. Upward of 75% of people live in countries classified as water insecure or critically water insecure, and 2 billion people live on land that is sinking as groundwater aquifers collapse. “This report tells an uncomfortable truth: Many critical water systems are already bankrupt,” Madani said. “It’s extremely urgent [because] no one knows exactly when the whole system would collapse.”
A young Congolese worker sifts through stones at a copper and cobalt mine.Michel Lunanga/Getty Images
The Democratic Republic of the Congo has given the U.S. government a vetted list of mining and processing projects open to American investment. The shortlist, which Mining.com said was delivered to U.S. officials last week, includes manganese, gold, and cassiterite licenses; a copper-cobalt project and a germanium-processing venture; four gold permits; a lithium license; and mines producing cobalt, gold, and tungsten. The potential deals are an outgrowth of the peace agreement Trump brokered between the DRC and Rwanda-backed rebels, and could offer Washington a foothold in a mineral-rich country whose resources China has long dominated. But establishing an American presence in an unstable African country is a risky investment. As I reported for Heatmap back in October, the Denver-based Energy Fuels’ $2 billion mining project in Madagascar was suddenly thrown into chaos when the island nation’s protests resulted in a coup, though the company has said recently it’s still moving forward.
The Tokyo Electric Power Company is delaying the restart of the Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear power station in western Japan after an alarm malfunction. The alarm system for the control rods that keep the fission reaction in check failed to sound during a test operation on Tuesday, Tepco said. The world’s largest nuclear plant had been scheduled to restart one of its seven reactors on Tuesday. Fuel loading for the reactor, known as Unit 6, was completed in June. It’s unclear when the restart will now take place.
The delay marks a setback for Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, who has made restarting the reactors idled after the 2011 Fukushima disaster and expanding the nuclear industry a top priority, as I told you in October. But as I wrote last month in an exclusive about Japan’s would-be national small modular reactor champion, the country has a number of potential avenues to regain its nuclear prowess beyond just reviving its existing fleet.
As a fourth-generation New Yorker, I’m qualified to say something controversial: I love, and often even prefer, Montreal-style bagels. They’re smaller, more efficient, and don’t deliver the same carbohydrate bomb to my gut. Now the best-known Montreal-style bagel place in the five boroughs has found a way to use the energy needed to make their hand-rolled, wood-fired bagels more efficiently, too. Black Seed Bagels’ catering kitchen in northern Brooklyn is now part of a battery pilot program run by David Energy, a New York-based retail energy provider. The startup supplied suitcase-sized batteries for free last August, allowing Black Seed to disconnect from ConEdison’s grid during hours when electricity rates are particularly high. “We’re in the game of nickels and dimes,” Noah Bernamoff, Black Seed’s co-owner, told Canary Media. “So we’re always happy to save the money.” Wise words.
