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Increasingly, however, Republicans are embracing the left’s favored restrictions. Mike Rogers, the GOP nominee for Senate in Michigan, just endorsed a one-year moratorium on data centers, according to the Detroit News. In a Thursday post on X, days after President Donald Trump admonished him for the “mistake” of pausing data centers, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said his executive order restricting the facilities had halted “up to 1,800 data center projects.” Three-quarters of Americans now say they would oppose a new data center being built near where they live, according to a new Heatmap Pro poll my colleague Robinson Meyer wrote up. That’s prompted the federal government to step in with plans to build and own the nation’s largest power station, a colossal gas-burning plant. Now Elon Musk’s AI company, SpaceXAI, is asking the largest federal utility, the Tennessee Valley Authority, to provide its data centers with more electricity, according to the Daily Memphian.
Last summer, I stood on the desolate shores of the Pepto-Bismol-pink Great Salt Lake in Utah, where the startup Lilac Solutions was harvesting lithium from the water. The novel harvesting method, called direct lithium extraction, uniquely avoids the environmental scars of hard-rock mining and the heavy water usage of the lithium brine pools popular in Chile. It was, on multiple fronts, an impressive sight. The Trump administration seems to agree. On Thursday, the Department of Energy gave the company $100 million to support construction of a lithium extraction and refining facility at the very location I visited. It’s not the only awardee. The agency gave out another $100 million to the startup Jervois to open a cobalt refinery, and another $100 million still for the battery recycling Nth Cycle. Earlier stage startups Princeton NuEnergy, Arcanum Ventures, Elevated Materials, and Coreshell Technology each received $50 million for projects spanning cathode recycling, electrolyte chemicals, lithium-metal materials, and silicon-anode batteries. In total, the Energy Department gave out $500 million.
The Trump administration is set to start relaxing normal summertime gasoline requirements, clearing the way for an early shift to the sale of wintertime blends to ease the cost of fuel as the Iran War sends prices upward. Summertime blends are typically more expensive, since the refining process requires a mix that evaporates less in gas tanks during heat. Wintertime blends, by contrast, can lean more on cheap additives like butane that will not evaporate in tanks during the cold. The Environmental Protection Agency said Thursday it would allow for dirtier-burning wintertime fuel blends that typically don’t hit the market until mid-September. Starting on September 1, the EPA waiver will allow the sale of gasoline blended with 10% ethanol, which evaporates faster than summertime fuel, Bloomberg reported.
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Vaca Muerta looks a little like Texas. JUAN MABROMATA/AFP via Getty Images
Peter Thiel isn’t the only American billionaire buying into Argentina’s attempt to spur on an oil and gas boom in its Vaca Muerta shale formation. On Thursday, oil magnate Howard Hamm told the Financial Times that his Continental Resources was buying a 50% stake in Phoenix Global Resources, whose parent company plans to quadruple oil production to 100,000 barrels per day in Vaca Muerta by 2031. Hamm said he’s built a close relationship with Argentinian President Javier Milei, an ally of Trump who is pushing for deregulation of oil and gas drilling. “He’s done the right things. He’s got the right people in the right places and is making the changes necessary day by day,” Hamm told the newspaper. “We are all very encouraged with the leadership he has shown.” Still, as I told you this week, the American oil majors’ eyes are really on Africa next.
Pacifico Energy Korea, the U.S.-based company behind the 2.1 gigawatts of wind turbines off the coast of South Korea, won approval to serve as the sole developer of the country’s biggest new offshore wind project. The company’s twin projects, the Manho Offshore Wind and Jindo Baram Offshore Wind projects, are advancing just a day after the Danish wind giant Orsted proposed a new 2-gigawatt wind farm off Taiwan’s shores, as I reported yesterday. The projects highlight the extent to which, outside the U.S. and Japan, offshore wind is still booming, “This selection is an important milestone in building a large-scale offshore wind cluster in the Jeonnam-Gwangju region,” Seung-Ho Choe, Representative Director of Pacifico Energy Korea, said in a statement to the trade publication 4C Offshore.
The dream of nuclear-propelled cargo ships is anchoring a little closer to reality. The British maritime nuclear startup Core Power just inked a deal with the Port of Corpus Christi Authority to work on a site-specific readiness study for the Texas port. It’s the second U.S. port, after California’s Port of Long Beach, to explore the concept, World Nuclear News reported.
The new estimate comes as more candidates for statewide office build campaigns around opposing data centers. The latest is Aaron Ford, Nevada’s attorney general and a Democratic candidate for governor, who vowed Wednesday to “pause tax breaks” for data centers if elected.
The Trump administration has launched an effort to fast-track permitting of data centers and utility infrastructure along federal highway and railway corridors. This week, the Department of Transportation took the first step to establish what it dubbed America’s Great Corridors of Commerce, along which the agency “will build, in record time, a new backbone for the world’s strongest economy.” In a public notice posted to a federal website Tuesday, the Transportation Department said the potential policy changes would aim to “drastically accelerate the siting, permitting, and financing of linear utility infrastructure projects, including electrical transmission lines, water pipelines along highways, pipelines along railways, fiber optic, and rural broadband.” The zones will also “incentivize data centers, manufacturing facilities, and distribution hubs to locate close to” the corridors “to leverage a ‘plug and play’ model for easy connectivity to new utility corridors.” The proposal, which is currently only a request for information before a September 12 deadline, would also “reduce administrative burdens” for state transportation agencies and railroads “giving them the vital technology backbone — from Wi-Fi and safety systems to intelligent transportation systems — needed to build the connected, intelligent transportation networks of tomorrow.”
If you want proof things can in fact get built, look — perhaps counterintuitively — to clean energy. Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts to curtail development of renewables, new data from S&P Global Energy shows that clean power is booming in America. The U.S. is on track to add a record 45 gigawatts of clean power this year — equal to the average electricity demand of all of Turkey. “There was a campaign promise to go against renewables, but at the same time they’re realizing that you can’t do without it,” Izzet Bensusan, chief executive of the energy investment firm Captona, told the Financial Times. “I don’t see a world where power demand is flattening out.”
Next-generation geothermal technology first debuted in the U.S. in 2013, when Ormat — the company I once embarrassingly called the “unc” of geothermal — completed a 1.7-megawatt demonstration project at a site in western Nevada. A decade later, Fervo Energy — the hot rock sector’s hottest new stock — started up its 3.5-megawatt, Google-backed demonstration plant in northern Nevada. Now one of Fervo’s closest rivals, Sage Geosystems, has joined the list. On Wednesday, Canary Media reported that the company had begun producing power at its 3-megawatt Texas pilot plant in April. Like Fervo, Sage is using the same horizontal drilling and fracking technology that transformed America into the world’s top producer of both oil and gas. Cindy Taff, the chief executive, spent decades at the helm of Royal Dutch Shell’s fracking division. For a refresher on how the technology works, I recommend this 101 explainer my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote last summer.
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The Trump administration is doing all it can to keep coal-fired stations from retiring, even funding construction of the first U.S. new coal plants in over a decade. But an electrical cooperative in North Dakota is thinking about how to keep a coal-fired plant open even if a future White House looks to crack down once again on emissions. On Wednesday, the North Dakota Monitor reported Minnkota Power Cooperative had inked a deal to work with a carbon capture and storage developer to revive a long-stalled project. The state’s Clean Sustainable Energy Authority recommended approving a combined $205 million in loans for the partnership between Minnkota and Reliant Carbon Capture & Storage. The state industrial commission — to which the sustainability agency, established in 2021, reports — will have final approval.
Canada’s largest oil producers, meanwhile, told Reuters they plan to make a final investment decision on a sweeping carbon capture project called Pathways in Alberta by the end of next year.
Tilting at windmills. Annabelle Chih/Getty Images
Taiwan’s long-stalled offshore wind buildout was supposed to justify the self-governing island’s shutdown of its nuclear power stations. Yet the Taiwanese successfully constructed less than 5 gigawatts of offshore turbines before powering down the last reactor. That put the country at a deficit since the atomic stations once provided more than 5 gigawatts of power, and left a place widely considered to be at risk of a Chinese invasion in the coming years more reliant on imported fossil fuels. But Orsted is now stepping up to build more turbines. On Wednesday, the Danish giant announced plans to develop a new 2-gigawatt project off Taiwan. The project is the larger, second phase of the Dadu plant the company is already developing, according to offshoreWIND.biz.
Deforestation and aquaculture across Southeast Asia’s fast-growing economies have destroyed mangroves at an alarming rate. But here’s some good news: Even more new mangroves are growing back in other parts of the world. Global mangrove cover has increased over the past 40 years, with a net gain of 47,720 hectares, or about 185 square miles between 1985 and 2025. That’s according to a new tally by Global Mangrove Watch, a project at Aberystwyth University in Wales. Indonesia has lost nearly 800 square miles of mangrove since 1985, and Myanmar, Malaysia, and Nigeria record significant declines. Australia, India, and the Philippines, by contrast, saw growth. “The overall increase in mangrove cover is encouraging, but it also shows that progress is uneven, with some regions continuing to experience significant losses,” Pete Bunting, a researcher at Aberystwyth University whose work was part of the study, said in a press release. “The findings also highlight the complexity of mangrove change, with gains in some areas linked to both restoration efforts and natural processes.”
