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In aligning with fossil fuel companies, the administration is deepening skepticism of carbon removal.
For as long as people have been talking about building machines that suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the concept has sparked fierce debate. Would such a tool be used the way that scientists envision — alongside aggressive emission cuts? Or would it be co-opted to prolong dependence on fossil fuels?
Suddenly these questions have become less theoretical. Last month, Carbon Engineering, one of the first companies to actually build a “direct air capture” machine, was acquired by Occidental Petroleum, a fossil fuel company that plans to use the technology to market “net-zero oil.” The Biden administration has also selected Occidental as a potential recipient of one of two major grants, worth up to $600 million each, to build a “DAC hub” in South Texas near Corpus Christi. As part of the same announcement, the Department of Energy gave funding to oil and gas companies in California, Alaska, and Alabama for the early planning stages of additional hubs.
“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change," Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in a press release for the DAC hub awards. "We also need to remove the CO2 that we’ve already put in the atmosphere,”
She’s right. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says pursuing carbon removal is “unavoidable” if the world hopes to limit warming to safer temperatures — but it will only work if we stop burning so much oil and gas. In handing the reins of this new industry to fossil fuel companies, the administration has confused the message, stoking the mistrust of those already skeptical of the technology, and giving carbon removal projects with no fossil fuel connections a steeper hill to climb to earn support.
It hasn’t helped that Occidental’s CEO, Vicki Hollub, has described DAC as a “license to continue to operate.” Shortly after the Biden administration’s announcement, she told NPR that thanks to this technology, “there’s no reason not to produce oil and gas forever.” When I reached out to Occidental for clarification, a spokesperson denied that the company will use the technology to pump more oil than it otherwise would. He pointed me to another statement from Hollub in 2022 where she said producing net-zero oil was about “just meeting demand,” and that as long as there was demand for oil, it was better to meet it with a lower-carbon product.
But the aforementioned events have invited fierce blowback. On Wednesday, 17 climate and environmental justice organizations sent a letter to Secretary Granholm calling on the DOE to revoke its funding offers to fossil fuel companies. “There may be paths forward for equitable, climate-positive DAC, but they do not look like the one we’re on now,” they wrote.
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Climate advocates and community groups are not just concerned about giving fossil fuel companies a license to keep producing. Their objection is tied to where these projects are being deployed. The DAC hubs are almost all being planned in economically distressed areas that have hosted fossil fuel production for decades. The bipartisan infrastructure law, which funded the hubs, requires that at least two meet those characteristics.
This makes some economic and political sense. If you need to build pipelines to transport CO2 or drill into the ground to store it, this is where the knowhow resides. The requirement is also intended as a way to create new jobs and transition workers in places that might otherwise be devastated by the decline of the oil and gas industry. But since fossil fuel companies have a track record of polluting these areas with cancerous chemicals and fighting regulations, locals worry about the risks of putting new technology into their hands.
These fears are not unfounded. There are different types of direct air capture technology, but many require energy or heat to separate and compress the CO2 after it is collected, which could create additional pollution depending on how it is generated. The compressed carbon may then have to be transported, via pipeline, to its final destination. While CO2 pipelines have a good safety record, a highly publicized accident in Mississippi that hospitalized 45 people has fanned fears of ruptures.
Perhaps the biggest worry is around what happens next. Some companies, including Occidental, inject CO2 into depleted oil fields in an effort to squeeze the last drops out. But DOE-funded hubs will not be permitted to do this. Instead, the compressed CO2 will likely be injected into a saline aquifer, a layer of permeable rock thousands of feet underground, which is capped by an impermeable layer that prevents the CO2 from leaking out.
Some geological storage wells have been storing carbon successfully for decades, but there are only a handful of such sites operating around the world. A recent report to Congress detailing U.S. experience with CO2 injection summarized several potential risks to human health associated with it, including drinking water contamination, leaks, effects on soil health, and earthquakes. However, it also noted that CO2 injection wells have more stringent construction, testing, and monitoring regulations than other types.
In Kern County, California, where three DAC hubs have been proposed, all of this invokes deja vu. Juan Flores, an organizer for the Center on Race, Poverty and the Environment, one of the signatories to Wednesday’s letter, told me it reminds people of fracking, which brought increased risk of respiratory problems, cancer, preterm birth, and psychological stress to the area. “They experimented with our communities, they denied the new dangers for many years,” he said. “Now our community members are saying, ‘this again?’”
The DOE hubs program required companies to submit a plan for providing community benefits when they applied for funding. But in Kern County, oil and gas companies have squandered their goodwill, Dan Ress, a staff attorney at the Center told me. For example, the California Resources Corporation, an oil and gas company that won an $11 million DOE grant to do an engineering study for a hub in Kern County, recently supported a multi-million dollar campaign to repeal hard-won regulations banning oil drilling next to homes and schools. “This is the same company saying, oh yeah, we want to be good neighbors and do great community benefits? Absolutely not, get out of here,” said Ress.
The feeling of being the unwitting subjects of an experiment also came up in my conversation with Roishetta Ozane, a community organizer in Lake Charles, Louisiana. That’s where another DAC hub called Project Cypress, which could receive up to $600 million from the DOE, is under development. “We don't want to be guinea pigs for something that's never been tried and tested before on this scale,” Ozane told me.
Ozane is the director of the Vessel Project, a grassroots group supporting the needs of black, indigenous, people of color, and low income people in an industrial city where petrochemical production has dramatically expanded over the past decade. (The group was not a signatory on the letter.) She said Lakes Charles is overburdened with pollution and still recovering from a spate of destructive hurricanes in 2020. “We're saying, hey, you might be right. These DAC hubs might work. But why are you testing it in our community?”
There are no fossil fuel companies involved in Project Cypress. But that does not give Ozane any peace of mind. She worries it would “open the floodgates” for companies to keep releasing toxic emissions into the area, as long as they pay someone to pull carbon out of the air afterward.
Multiple people I spoke with in Louisiana and Texas also brought up a history of local officials giving heavy industry a free pass on pollution and major tax breaks. Why should they believe that the DAC hubs will be any better regulated or bring in much-needed revenue?
But local attitudes along the Gulf Coast are varied and complex. Prior to the hubs announcement, Data for Progress, a polling and research non-profit that spearheaded Wednesday’s letter, held a series of focus groups about DAC in Louisiana and Texas. One key finding, Celina Scott-Buechler, a senior fellow who led the research, told me, was that there was a tension between concerns like Ozane’s, and an awareness that fossil fuel companies historically have been the primary sources of good jobs in these communities.
“I think people make a calculated risk decision,” one focus group participant in Lake Charles said. “They're like, oh, so I could be around these chemicals that could have a long-term effect. I may not see them for the next 20, 30 years, but if it's going to take care of my family and give my family a nice home and a good vehicle to drive, then I'll work tirelessly to provide that for my family. But I may die at 65.”
Another stressed that there was a “big need for jobs” and that “sometimes people's need for employment overshadows whether it's good for the environment or not.”
Patrick Nye, who lives in the Corpus Christi area near where Occidental is building its South Texas hub, embodies this tension. Nye owns an energy company that produces oil and generates wind power, but he also runs an environmental group that’s fighting the local expansion of liquified natural gas export facilities and proposed seawater desalination projects. When I asked about his oil business, he said he didn’t have the heart to let his employees go and puts his profits toward his activism.
Nye is skeptical that direct air capture will work, but he thinks it’s worth trying. “If this works, this may help save the planet,” he said. He also sees a lot of potential opportunities flowing to the local university and its graduates. And he thinks the hub will be far enough away from where people live that if things go wrong, few will be impacted. Occidental is building its hub in a largely undeveloped area about 45 miles south of Corpus Christi on King Ranch, the largest private ranch in the country.
At the same time, he’s worried local officials will just rubber stamp the project without proper study. “King Ranch is really well known, they're very politically positioned,” he said. “They have a lot of clout to get this thing done, and it has to be looked at with a very fine tooth comb.”
In addition to requesting DOE withdraw grants for fossil fuel companies, the letter sent Wednesday makes a pitch for how the agency can roll out the DAC hubs program more equitably. The authors propose that projects in areas with extractive industries be co-created or co-owned by communities, actively work to reduce local pollution, have rigorous data transparency, and that locals should have the right to refuse them. They also want community benefits plans to be legally binding, with consequences if companies fail to comply.
All these requirements might sound unfair to companies who are just trying to tackle climate change and make a better world, Scott-Buechler acknowledged. “The question that I ask is, a better world for whom?”
I asked her what it would look like in practice for a community to co-own a DAC hub, considering these are first-of-a-kind projects that are incredibly expensive and financially risky. Would communities be taking on those risks?
This was something that Data for Progress and other groups were still studying, she said, looking at possibilities like having the project held in public trust, or replicating the solar cooperative model. She recognizes that not all communities will be interested in ownership, but thinks it should be an option.
When I asked the DOE how it defends the choice to support fossil fuel company-led projects, a spokesperson told me the agency is “leveraging these companies' significant expertise in managing large energy infrastructure projects and applying this experience to developing DAC projects that are cost-effective, efficient, equitable, and environmentally responsible.”
She also emphasized that Occidental and Project Cypress have only been selected for “award negotiation” and not “officially” awarded yet. “If projects are awarded, DOE and the awardee will have frequent, meaningful engagement with the impacted local community and impacted workers throughout the lifecycle of the project,” she said.
Meanwhile, the agency has also launched a public process to develop a set of safety, environmental stewardship, accountability, and community engagement guidelines for all carbon management projects that it will encourage project developers to (voluntarily) abide by.
But the Biden administration seems eager to support Occidental in its pursuit of direct air capture and encourage more oil and gas companies to follow its lead. During a carbon capture conference last year, Secretary Granholm applauded Oxy’s CEO Vicki Hollub for investing in carbon removal, saying this reflects “exactly the kind of bold thinking we need more of.” Earlier this year, she told a room of oil and gas executives, “We need the energy sector stepping up … few are better positioned to crack open cost-effective carbon management.”
The debate over whether direct air capture is a moral hazard is likely to rage on long after these projects are up and running. But the money is going out the door now. “This is something that is not just coming anymore, it's here,” said Scott Buechler. “Is there a collective vision for what might be able to come next?”
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On Trump’s latest wind target, new critical minerals, and methane maps
Current conditions: In the Atlantic, Tropical Storm Fernand is heading northward toward Bermuda • In the Pacific, Tropic Storm Juliette is active about 520 miles southwest of Baja California, with winds of up to 65 miles per hour • Temperatures are surging past 100 degrees Fahrenheit in South Korea.
Renewable investments dim in the U.S.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
In the United States, investments in renewable energy fell by 36% — equal to $20.5 billion — compared to the second half of last year, according to new data from the consultancy BloombergNEF. The drop “reflects a rush of construction toward the end of last year as developers sought to lock in lucrative tax credits, followed by a sharp drop this year as policy conditions worsened,” the report stated. The European Union, on the other hand, ratcheted up spending on renewables by 63% — or nearly $30 billion — in the first half of this year compared to the second half of 2024. Drawing an even sharper contrast, investments into both onshore and offshore wind made up the bulk of the growth in Europe as the Trump administration has placed the harshest restrictions on wind turbines of any other energy source.
Overall, global investment into clean energy rose 10% in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. That included a worldwide increase in wind investments of 24% and a jump in new solar investment of 5%.
The U.S. Geological Survey released its latest list of critical minerals on Monday. The report highlights some shifts in U.S. production and concerns in Washington over potential supply disruptions from supposedly friendly powers. While the analysis identifies China as the biggest threat to the U.S. economy in 46 of the 84 commodities studied, “Canada and South Africa both show up as potential points of disruption across eight imports,” Farrell Gregory, a non-resident fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, wrote on X. “Interestingly, Canada is identified as having a high-risk for disruption, more than South Africa and Russia.”
There were new bright spots in the report. The USGS removed tellurium, a silvery brittle metal used in semiconductors, from the list of risk resources it was added to in 2022. That’s because a new Rio Tinto mine transformed the U.S. from an importer into a net exporter in recent years.
It could have been worse. The Treasury guidance issued Friday dictating what wind and solar projects will be eligible for federal tax credits could have effectively banned developers from tapping the write-offs set to start phasing out next July. In the weeks before the Internal Revenue Service released its rules, GOP lawmakers from states with thriving wind and solar industries, including Senators John Curtis of Utah and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, publicly lobbied for laxer rules as part of what they pitched as the all-of-the-above “energy dominance” strategy on which Trump campaigned. Grassley went so far as to block two of Trump’s Treasury nominees “until I can be certain that such rules and regulations adhere to the law and congressional intent,” as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin covered earlier in August.
Since the guidance came out on Friday, both Grassley and Curtis have put out positive statements backing the plan. “I appreciate the work of Secretary [Scott] Bessent and his staff in balancing various concerns and perspectives to address the President’s executive order on wind and solar projects,” Curtis said, according to E&E News. Calling renewables “an essential part of the ‘all of the above’ energy equation,” Grassley’s statement said the guidance “seems to offer a viable path forward for the wind and solar industries to continue to meet increased energy demand” and “reflects some of the concerns Congress and industry leaders have raised.”
Gas power plants are booming in the U.S. as demand surges, but the growth doesn’t yet mark a fundamental shift away from renewables, clean-energy analyst Michael Thomas wrote in a post on his Substack newsletter, Distilled. “If there were to be an unprecedented pivot to gas, you’d expect Texas to be ground zero for it,” he said. “The state has done everything it can to prop up fossil fuel power in recent years. It’s also one of the most permissive when it comes to environmental regulations and permitting.” Despite major growth in the past year, he wrote, gas made up just 10% of proposed new project capacity in Texas so far this year. The remaining 90% of capacity came from solar, wind, and battery projects. Last year alone, renewable and storage developers proposed 100 gigawatts of clean capacity — seven times more than gas developers proposed.
A new map allowing users to track risks from natural gas super-emitters launched Tuesday from the independent energy science and policy institute PSE Healthy Energy. The Methane Risk Map is a web tool with clickable markers representing individual methane super-emitting events throughout the U.S. Selecting one, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “opens up a heatmap and information panel that shows the concentration of benzene, methane, and other pollutants present in that particular plume, the modeled distance each one traveled during the event, the demographics of the population exposed, and whether there were any sensitive facilities, such as schools or hospitals, in the exposure pathway.”
Though methane, the primary component of natural gas, is an extremely potent greenhouse gas and can pose an explosive risk at high concentrations, other components in unrefined natural gas present more direct public health risks. These include carcinogens like benzene and other health-harming substances, including toluene.
The grid-tech startup Splight has raised nearly $13 million to fund the commercial scaling of its breakthrough software. Unlike dynamic line rating, which uses weather and temperature data to open up more space on existing power lines to funnel as much as 30% more electricity, Splight claims its "dynamic congestion management” software can double the amount of room for electrons to flow without building new grid infrastructure.
The Methane Risk Map combines satellite and geologic data to visualize chemical exposure from natural gas plumes.
Methane-sniffing satellites have brought unprecedented visibility to “super-emitter” events, when the planet-warming gas gushes into the atmosphere at alarming rates — often from leaky fossil fuel infrastructure.
But those plumes contain more than just methane. Scientists are now using satellite data to look beyond the climate risks and assess the danger of super-emitting wells, tanks, and other assets to nearby communities.
PSE Healthy Energy, an independent energy science and policy institute, unveiled a “Methane Risk Map” on Tuesday that illustrates the spread of health-harming pollutants like benzene and toluene that also emanate from methane super-emitter events.
“The Methane Risk Map translates methane as a climate problem into methane as an air quality and human health issue,” Seth Shonkoff, PSE’s executive director, said during a briefing last week.
The vast majority of what we call “natural gas” is methane, but when it comes out of the ground, it also contains a host of other compounds, including carcinogens. The exact mix varies by location, and also changes as it moves through the oil and gas supply chain.
The Methane Risk Map is a web tool with clickable markers representing individual methane super-emitter events throughout the U.S. Selecting one opens up a heatmap and information panel that shows the concentration of benzene, methane, and other pollutants present in that particular plume, the modeled distance each one traveled during the event, the demographics of the population exposed, and whether there were any sensitive facilities, such as schools or hospitals, in the exposure pathway. It also gives the date the emission event occurred and what kind of equipment it came from, if available, such as a well or a tank.
Courtesy of PSE Healthy Energy
Underlying the map are two relatively new scientific developments. The first, as mentioned earlier, is satellite data. PSE pulls data released by the nonprofit Carbon Mapper, which launched its premiere satellite a year ago. Carbon Mapper’s sensing tools, developed in collaboration with NASA, essentially point a telephoto lens at oil or gas facilities to detect methane super-emitter events and measure how much of the gas is streaming out.
The problem, however, is that the satellite can only detect methane.
To solve that problem, PSE researchers created a database of the composition of natural gas at more than 4,000 facilities, spanning 19 oil- and gas-producing basins. When oil and gas operators apply for air permits, they have to submit facility-specific gas composition data from laboratory reports, often derived from direct samples of the gas. Researchers from PSE Healthy Energy went through thousands of regulatory documents to compile a database based on these reports. They found hazardous pollutants in more than 99% of the samples.
To build the Methane Risk Map, PSE combined methane emission rates from Carbon Mapper with this site-specific gas composition data, then used an air dispersion model to estimate the peak concentrations of each pollutant in the surrounding area after the release and show the area at risk. The map includes risk benchmarks set by state regulators for each pollutant, and shows that hazardous air pollutant levels from these super-emitters often exceed them.
While methane itself isn’t toxic, it can pose a safety risk at high enough concentrations from explosions or fires. So in addition to information about traditional air pollutants, users can also view the extent to which the methane released by an event posed a threat to the surrounding area.
One of the shortcomings of the project, and of methane-mapping efforts in general, is that the data isn’t accessible in real time. Carbon Mapper takes roughly a month from when its satellite spots a super-emitter to process and release the emissions data publicly — then PSE will have to run its own models and update its map. The satellites also represent only a moment in time — they don’t tell you when a leak started or how long it lasted. While the time delay could improve with technological and other advances, fixing the latter would require a lot more satellites.
The Methane Risk Map can’t yet function as an emergency response tool in a public health context, but that also wasn’t quite the intent behind the project. The PSE researchers envision policymakers, regulators, lawyers, and communities using the tool to push for stronger regulations, such as safer setback distances, stricter air quality monitoring requirements, and leak detection and repair rules.
The Environmental Protection Agency finalized stronger rules regulating methane and air pollution from the oil and gas sector in 2023, under the Biden administration. But after Trump took over the federal apparatus, the agency said it was “reconsidering” those rules. Since then, the EPA has extended compliance deadlines for many of the rules.
“As regulatory rollbacks in the climate and air quality arenas occur in the coming months, having this type of defensible data on the risk of these events and the risks they pose to human health will become increasingly important,” Kelsey Bilsback, the principal investigator for the project, said during the briefing.
Right now the map only includes emissions from the “upstream” oil and gas sector, but PSE plans to expand the project to include leaks from the midstream and downstream, too, such as pipelines and end-users.
Analysts are betting that the stop work order won’t last. But the risks for the developer could be more serious.
The Danish offshore wind company Orsted was already in trouble. It was looking to raise about half of its market value in new cash because it couldn’t sell stakes in its existing projects. The market hated that idea, and the stock plunged almost 30% following the announcement of the offering. That was two weeks ago.
The stock has now plunged again by 16% to a record low on Monday. That follows the announcement late Friday night that the Department of the Interior had issued a stop work order for the company’s Revolution Wind project, off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut. This would allow regulators “to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States,” the DOI’s letter said. The project is already 80% complete, according to the company, and was due to be finished and operating by next year.
While Donald Trump’s antipathy towards the wind industry — and especially the offshore wind industry — is no secret, analysts were not convinced the order would be a death blow to project, let alone Orsted. But it’s still quite bad news.
“This is another setback for Orsted, and the U.S. offshore wind industry,” Jefferies analyst Ahmed Farman wrote in a note to clients on Sunday. “The question now is whether a deal can be struck to restart the project like Empire Wind,” the New York offshore wind farm that received a similar stop work order in April, only to have it lifted in May.
Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop tacked in the same direction on Monday. “We expect the order to be lifted, as was the case for Equinor’s Empire Wind project off the coast of New York last May,” he wrote in a note to clients, adding an intriguing post-script: “The Empire Wind case suggests President Donald Trump’s administration uses stop-work orders to exert pressure on East Coast Democratic governors regarding specific issues.”
When the federal government lifted its stop work order on Empire Wind, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum wrote on X that he was “encouraged by Governor Hochul’s comments about her willingness to move forward on critical pipeline capacity,” likely referring to two formerly moribund pipeline proposals meant to carry shale gas from Pennsylvania into the Northeast. Hochul herself denied there was any quid pro quo between the project restarting and any pipeline developments. Meanwhile, the White House said days later that Hochul had “caved.”
The natural question becomes, then, what can the governors of Rhode Island and Connecticut offer Trump? At least so far, the states’ Democratic governors have criticized the administration for issuing the stop work order and said they will “pursue every avenue to reverse the decision to halt work on Revolution Wind.”
Yet they have no obvious card to play, Allen Brooks, a former Wall Street analyst and a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics, told me. “They were not blocking pipelines the way the state of New York was, so there’s not much they can do,” he said.
Even if Interior does reverse the order, the risk of a catastrophic outcome for Orsted has certainly gone up. The company’s rights issue, where existing shareholders have an option to expand their stakes at a discount, is intended to raise 60 billion Danish kroner, or around $9 billion, with some 5 billion kroner, or $800 million, due to complete Revolution. Jefferies has estimated that Revolution, which Orsted owns half of, will ultimately cost the company $4 billion.
The administration’s active hostility toward wind development “calls into question that business model,” Brooks told me. “There’s going to be a lot of questions as to whether [offshore wind developers] are going to be able to raise money.”
The Danish government, which is the majority shareholder of Orsted, said soon after the announcement that it would participate in the fundraising. The company reaffirmed that patronage on Monday, saying that it has the “continued support and commitment to the rights issue from its majority shareholder.”
Orsted’s big drop will also drag down the fortunes of its neighbor Norway, via the latter’s majority state-owned wind power company Equinor, which bought a 10% stake in Orsted late last year.
“Their investment decision looks terrible,” Brooks told me.
At the close of trading in Europe, Orsted’s market capitalization stood at around $12 billion. That’s about a third less than where it sat before the share sale announcement.
In a worst case scenario involving the cancellation of both Revolution and Sunrise Wind, another troubled offshore project planned to serve customers in Massachusetts, Fulop predicts that the long-run value of Orsted would go down enough that it would have to offer its new shares at a greater discount — which would, of course, raise less money.
The best case scenario may be that Orsted will join its Scandinavian peer in resolving a hostage negotiation with the White House, with billions of dollars of investment and over 1,000 jobs in the balance.
“The Empire Wind case suggests President Donald Trump’s administration uses stop-work orders to exert pressure on East Coast Democratic governors regarding specific issues,” Fulop wrote. Right now, it’s workers, investors, elected officials, and New England ratepayers feeling the pressure.