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It rhymes with ‘schmurricane schmeason.’
The American oil refining business is a national colossus, with almost 130 facilities taking in some 16 million barrels of crude oil per day and turning it into nearly 10 million barrels of gasoline and 5 million barrels of diesel. And unlike some past years, inventories are looking pretty good heading into this summer. While they’re lower than the five-year average, gasoline supplies are still higher than where they were a year ago, and refineries are a ways away from running at their peak capacity. According to the forecasters at GasBuddy, we’re looking at relatively mild summertime prices of around $3.50 to $3.60 per gallon.
The one wild card: weather. About half of America’s refining capacity sits on the Gulf Coast, putting America’s fuel production squarely in the target zone of what could be an especially active hurricane season.
“If you recall 2022, inventories were tight and [refinery] utilization was tight,” explained Patrick De Haan, GasBuddy’s head of petroleum analysis. Gas prices peaked in June of 2022 at slightly over $5 per gallon, according to data the Energy Information Administration’s data, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine sent crude oil prices soaring to more $120 a barrel. “Our head is holding above water now,” he said, because demand is low. “We’re in a much better position going into the start of the summer compared to two years ago.”
Oil prices have largely stayed steady so far this year other than a brief spike in early April, despite continued attacks on shipping by Houthi rebels in Yemen and the ongoing threat of a spiraling regional conflict in the Middle East. The top gas price last month was around $3.67 a gallon, whereas GasBuddy’s range of possible prices for the summer months average closer to $3.60. All things considered, De Haan told me, “we got a little bit of breathing room.”
Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note to clients last week that gasoline stockpiles “remain close to the 5-year average level and are not drawing as strongly as usual for this time of year,” which puts downward pressure on prices. U.S. demand is hovering below 9 million barrels these days, which is right about the average demand in 2023, indicating that some consumer weakness may be responsible for relatively mild gas prices.
Weaker-than-expected demand for gasoline would be consistent with other signs of the American consumer being slightly less spendy in recent months. Overall retail sales in April were basically flat from the month before, according to Census Bureau data, and came in lower than economists’ expectations. Sales at gasoline stations were down 0.8% in the first four months of this year compared to the first four months of 2023, despite overall spending going up 3.5% from the same period a year ago.
What can be good for drivers may not be so great for investors and the gasoline complex at large. “It’s undeniable to say that there’s some trouble in gasoline land,” Rory Johnston, a commodities analyst and author of Commodity Context, told me. “In terms of whether it’s supply or demand more broadly, as always, it’s a bit of both.”
Whatever the cause, it will mean less profit for refiners, especially compared to the record outperformance they’ve seen in recent years.
“Gasoline prices and refining margins have come under pressure,” Reuters reported last week, meaning that refineries are making a bit less than before on the difference between crude oil and gasoline prices. Inventories are also being run down more slowly than is normal for the pre-summer season, the report said, “indicating supplies are plentiful, and undermining the bullish case for the fuel.”
And yet if it’s destructive enough, just one hurricane could upend that entire narrative. When Hurricane Harvey parked its torrential rains over Houston in 2017, it took a big chunk of the U.S. refinery complex offline, pushing gas prices up $0.36 in just two weeks.
While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has yet to release its official hurricane forecast for the year, The Weather Company has predicted that the 2024 season “could be one of the most active on record.” If those hurricanes hit the wrong parts of the Gulf Coast, the expected mild summer for America’s internal combustion-dependent drivers may be blown away.
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On Nationally Determined Contributions, hurricane damage, and PFAS pollution.
Current conditions:Tropical Storm Dana touched down in India with 70 mile-per-hour winds, causing 600,000 people to be evacuated • Parts of the Northwestern U.S. and Canada’s British Columbia may see snow this weekend • Dallas is on track for its second-hottest October on record.
Only dramatic action on emissions over and above existing policy and pledges will keep warming below the targets set in the Paris Agreement,
according to this year’s Union Nations Emissions Gap Report released on Thursday.
“Unless global emissions in 2030 are brought below the levels implied by existing policies and current [Nationally Determined Contributions], it will become impossible to reach a pathway that would limit global warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot,” the report said. Policy goals “must deliver a quantum leap in ambition in tandem with accelerated mitigation action in this decade.”
Greenhouse gas emissions rose by 1.2% in 2023, which is faster than the annual average rate of change in the 2010s. Current policies would likely deliver 2.9 degrees of warming by 2100, while warming might be limited to around 2.5 degrees if countries meet the policy commitments they’ve already made.
President Donald Trump withheld disaster aid following devastating wildfires in Washington State in 2020 due to his disagreements with Governor Jay Inslee over climate and Covid-19 policy, E&E News reported. Trump “refused to act on Gov. Jay Inslee’s request for $37 million in federal disaster aid because of a bitter personal dispute with the Democratic governor,” reporters Thomas Frank and Scott Waldman wrote. President Biden approved the request for aid in early February, 2021. The reporters wrote earlier this month that Trump had similarly waffled on disaster aid for California in 2018, only changing his mind after aides showed him how many votes he got in Orange County.
Natural gas production from shale, the “tight” rocks that nearly always require hydraulic fracturing for gas production, has declined in the United States over the first nine months of the year, and may show its first annual decline since the Energy Information Administration started tracking shale production in 2000.
Shale production fell over 1% through September, according to EIA data, to just over 81 billion cubic feet per day. The production declines are specific to geological formations in Texas and Louisiana, as well as the Appalachian Basin. They are likely driven by declining natural gas prices, which fell to record lows earlier this year.
As many as 95 million people in the United States may rely on groundwater contaminated with PFAS, the perfluoroalkyls and polyfluoroalkyls otherwise known as “forever chemicals.”
The United States Geological Survey study published in Science looked at the lower 48 states and used a predictive model to estimate how many people may have exposure to PFAS in their drinking water. The researchers first collected samples from “principal aquifers” — the large geologic formations that contain much of the nation’s groundwater — and then used those samples to predict PFAS concentrations throughout the drinking water system. The highest observed PFAS concentration was found in southern Florida.
PFAS can cause a range of negative health effects, including “kidney and testicular cancer, decreased fertility, elevated cholesterol, weight gain, thyroid disease, the pregnancy complication pre-eclampsia, increased risk of preterm birth and low birth weight, hormone interference, and reduced vaccine response in children,” as my colleague Jeva Lange wrote earlier this year. The model “indicate[s] widespread occurrence of PFAS in groundwater at depths of public and domestic drinking-water supplies,” the USGS researchers write.
Damages from Hurricane Helene in North Carolina alone have added up to $53 billion, the state’s governor Roy Cooper said. The costs are the hurricane-prone state’s largest ever from a storm, and about three times the repairs from Hurricane Florence in 2018. Nearly 100 people were killed by the storm in North Carolina, with some still missing. Cooper requested almost $4 billion from the state legislature “to begin rebuilding critical infrastructure, homes, businesses, schools, and farms damaged during the storm.”
The aftermath of Hurricane Helene in North Carolina. Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
“It is also essential that we continue to cooperate on climate, technology, debt, trade. Climate change and technology are unleashing transformations to the global economy that require global response. Only by working together can we seize the opportunities and mitigate the risks of these great changes.” — International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva presenting the organization’s latest Global Policy Agenda on Thursday.
An age-old tension, resolved.
For as long as I’ve been an energy reporter, I’ve been asked a scoffing question by moderates and conservatives: If Democrats really cared about climate change, shouldn’t they embrace nuclear power?
It’s a fair question. Nuclear energy, after all, can produce vast amounts of electricity without emitting planet-warming greenhouse gas pollution. It already generates more zero-carbon electricity in America than wind turbines and solar panels do combined; unlike renewables, it can provide power all day and night, even when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. The countries that have seen the largest year-over-year drops in carbon pollution — e.g. France — have generally done so by building a new fleet of nuclear reactors.
It’s also a factual question. For years, even as Democrats railed against fossil fuels, they dilly-dallied on nuclear issues. The party’s leaders in statehouses and legislative chambers around the country worked to shut down aging nuclear reactors or approved nuclear-skeptical regulators. President Barack Obama cheered next-generation nuclear in speeches, but appointed extremely nuclear-skeptical regulators to oversee the industry. (One of his first appointees to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Gregory Jaczko, has called for a global ban on nuclear energy since leaving the government.)
Even though nuclear reactors produced most of America’s zero-carbon electricity, they remained the, well, glowing-blue-haired step-child of America’s grid: Democrats regularly railed against fossil fuels, and they felt comfortable paying lip service to far-off atomic technologies, but they did not lavish nuclear with the unqualified support that they gave renewables. Instead, they let the nuclear industry slip into senescence. This mild toleration was punctuated by moments of extreme cognitive dissonance, such as when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down the Indian Point nuclear power plant in 2021 without lining up new zero-carbon generation to replace it — leading the state’s carbon emissions to soar.
Of course, Democrats didn’t have to do much to kill nuclear: At the same time, the market was doing a perfectly good job of it. As cheap natural gas flooded the American energy system in the 2010s, more and more nuclear plants became too expensive to run. From 2012 to 2022, 12 nuclear reactors shut down in the U.S., taking nearly 10,000 megawatts of low-carbon generation offline.
That was the status quo as recently as 2020 or even 2022. And it has remained the status quo in energy commentary. “What role, if any, does [Vice President Kamala Harris] see for nuclear power in her energy and climate plans?” askedThe New York Times columnist Bret Stephens last month, in a column titled “What Harris Must Do to Win Over Skeptics (Like Me).” At the vice presidential debate earlier this month, Republican nominee JD Vance even alluded to the argument amid a broader paean to fossil fuels. “If you really want to make the environment cleaner, you've got to invest in more energy production,” Vance said. “We haven't built a nuclear facility — I think one — in the past 40 years.”
In fact, Vance is wrong: The United States recently turned on two new nuclear reactors in Georgia — the first newly built reactors in America in 30 years. But this idea — Why aren’t we building more nuclear reactors? Why don’t Democrats do more to help nuclear? — has been a throughline of energy punditry since well before Vance was a best-selling author.
So I want to intervene in this conversation and note that the answer has now changed. Democrats are a pro-nuclear party now — not uniformly, but then again, neither are Republicans. Over the past several years, Democratic lawmakers and officials have adopted a slate of aggressively pro-nuclear policies and characterized the technology as pro-climate. Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm has called for America to build a new wave of conventional nuclear reactors — going much further than Obama ever did. Sometimes working with Republicans — but sometimes working alone, too — Democrats have pushed billions of dollars of support toward conventional nuclear reactors and the nascent advanced nuclear industry.
It’s worth stepping back here and going over what has actually changed.
For the past 10 years at least, both parties have been credibly committed to building up the advanced nuclear industry — the theoretical next generation of nuclear reactors that will be smaller, cleaner, and safer than the behemoths built during the Cold War. During the Trump administration, Congress passed a bipartisan bill meant to push along the advanced nuclear industry. It also passed the Energy Act of 2020, which authorized a demonstration program for advanced nuclear reactors.
The Biden administration has continued this support. The bipartisan infrastructure law created a $6 billion program that would pay existing nuclear power plants to stay open. At least $1.1 billion of that money will go to keeping Diablo Canyon, California’s only operating nuclear facility and its largest power plant, from shutting down; it was originally slated to close in 2025.
Earlier this year, Biden also extended a key program that indemnifies the nuclear industry for the cost of nuclear accidents and disasters above $16.1 billion.
But perhaps the most important nuclear law passed in the past five years is the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s signature climate package. For the first time ever, that law embraced the idea of “technology neutrality,” which means that electricity generated by nuclear reactors is now on the same footing as power from wind turbines or solar panels. If a method of electricity generation emits almost no carbon, then the government subsidizes it under the IRA.
The law is already helping restart nuclear reactors that have recently closed such as the Palisades reactor in Michigan and Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. The utility giant NextEra is also exploring plans to restart the Duane Arnold nuclear plant in Iowa, which closed in 2020. If those go through, then it will be able to take advantage of Inflation Reduction Act funding, as well.
Lawmakers from both parties have continued to back advanced nuclear research and deployment. Under Biden, Congress passed the ADVANCE Act, containing a hodgepodge of policies meant to help the advanced nuclear industry. Among other changes, it instructs the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to move faster when approving new reactor designs, and it changes that agency’s mission statement to more affirmatively support nuclear development.
Biden administration officials haven’t just backed that legislation, they’ve also asserted that it will “help us build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s,” as Michael Goff, who leads the Energy Department’s nuclear office, bragged in a statement.
The irony is that nuclear plants are now doing well enough that Congress has clawed back some of the money from the bipartisan infrastructure law. The industry, seemingly, doesn’t need it any more, and no additional nuclear reactors have been scheduled to shut down. In 2024, Congress stripped up to $3.7 billion to pay for a program to produce a type of high-assay used in next-generation nuclear reactors.
Democrats have begun to brag about their nuclear policymaking efforts on the campaign trail, as well. In her speech on economic policy earlier this month, Kamala Harris included “advanced nuclear” in a list of technologies that her administration would support.
“We will invest in biomanufacturing and aerospace; remain dominant in AI and quantum computing, blockchain and other emerging technologies; expand our lead in clean energy innovation and manufacturing,” she said, “so the next generation of breakthroughs — from advanced batteries to geothermal to advanced nuclear — are not just invented but built here in America by American workers.”
The party’s Senate candidates have become even more positive about nuclear energy. Candidates in Arizona, Michigan, Florida, and Texas have all backed nuclear power, as the reporter Alexander Kaufman at Huffpost has shown.
This transformation has happened even though the big big environmental groups that have historically set the party’s energy priorities have not changed their mind on nuclear. Although many green groups have scaled back or defunded their anti-nuclear activism, their rhetoric remains staunchly anti-nuclear. The Sierra Club calls nuclear power a “uniquely dangerous energy technology for humanity” and states on its website: “The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy.”
The party’s approach to nuclear hasn’t informed all its policy yet. The Biden administration’s nominations to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission have been criticized by pro-nuclear advocates for continuing the status quo or for not knowing enough about the advanced nuclear industry.
But Democrats are, by any measure, much more pro-nuclear now than they were 10 years ago — and much more pro-nuclear than they were a decade before that. (It’s often forgotten now that President Bill Clinton’s would-be climate policy, the BTU tax, also would have levied a fee on nuclear reactors.) Republicans also remain fairly pro-nuclear: Donald Trump has promised to approve “hundreds of new power plants,” including “new reactors,” during his presidency.
What remains unclear is whether both parties can persist in this new pro-nuclear formation. Nuclear energy is popular with a majority of the public, but only just; 56% of Americans favor building more nuclear power plants, according to the Pew Research Center. And there are signs, if you squint, of a potential coming era of GOP skepticism of nuclear power — part of the party’s broader turn against science and high-trust institutions.
Signs like: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has been added to Trump’s transition team, believes that nuclear power is unsafe and uneconomical. Even Trump himself, in conversation with Elon Musk, has worried about “nuclear warming” — it’s not clear what he was talking about, but it might be nuclear war — and said that nuclear has a “branding problem.” Even if Trump continues to support the idea of building “new reactors,” his potentially illegal plan to claw back the Inflation Reduction Act’s unspent funding may lead to pandemonium in the sector. If the nuclear industry is now planning on receiving IRA subsidies, then ending those subsidies — especially in a messy or chaotic way — could spell disaster.
There are identity-driven reasons for Republicans to turn on nuclear, too: The nuclear energy industry is more unionized than any other energy source, and it requires a highly institutionalized and educated workforce. (Yet not all the trends augur a realignment: Nuclear power remains much more popular with men than women.)
For now, though, both parties — including Democrats — support building new nuclear power plants. The economics are good for once, too. The question now is how long that will hold.
Current conditions:Tropical Storm Trami brought widespread flooding to the Philippines, killing at least 24 people • The Southwestern U.S. is experiencing a heatwave, with temperatures as high as 25 degrees Fahrenheit above normal • The three NASA astronauts stuck at the International Space Station due to inclement weather are finally on their way home.
The Swiss direct air capture company Climeworks has found a new, deep-pocketed partner in Morgan Stanley. The financial services company will pay an undisclosed amount to Climeworks to suck 40,000 tons of CO2 from the air and store the greenhouse gas underground on its behalf. This is the second largest deal Climeworks has secured to date, following an 80,000-ton sale to Boston Consulting Group, and the company says the purchase will help accelerate progress on its first project in the United States, a direct air capture hub in Louisiana called Project Cypress.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is rounding out its already extensive carbon removal portfolio with its first major investment in ocean-based technology. The tech giant agreed to buy up to 350,000 tons of CO2 removal from a startup called Ebb Carbon over the next 10 years, slightly more than its deal with the direct air capture company Heirloom.
Ebb uses electricity to separate seawater into acidic and basic streams, then returns the basic stream back to the ocean, where it reacts with carbon in the water and promotes faster CO2 absorption from the air. The company must achieve and verify an initial 1,300 tons of CO2 removal before Microsoft commits to buying the remainder. The company has a small pilot project up and running at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington, and is working with federal scientists and the University of Washington to measure and model the results.
The Treasury Department issued final rules this morning for the Advanced Manufacturing Production Tax Credit, also known as 45X. The program is the backbone of the Inflation Reduction Act, offering incentives for domestic manufacturing of the components of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries, subsidizing every step of the supply chain for these technologies. During a call with reporters on Wednesday, Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Wally Adeyemo said the tax credit has already driven more than $126 billion in private sector clean energy manufacturing investments.
The biggest change introduced in the final rule that the administration highlighted was allowing critical mineral extraction — separately and in addition to mineral processing — to qualify for a 10% tax credit. “The U.S. has major deposits of critical minerals like lithium and palladium. Extracting and processing them here in America, as opposed to relying on China, Russia, and other countries with weak worker and environmental protection, is an economic and national security priority for us,” Adeyemo said.
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Engineers at GE Vernova, the manufacturer of the Vineyard Wind offshore turbine blade that crashed into the ocean this summer, have been poring over ultrasound images of its other blades and conducting physical inspections with drones to figure out whether the fiasco was a one-off or a more widespread issue. During an earnings call on Wednesday, CEO Scott Strazik revealed that the company did, in fact, find a similar “manufacturing deviation” in “a very small proportion, low single-digit proportion” of the blades. The company now intends to “remove some blades from the Vineyard Wind farm while strengthening other blades as needed,” according to an update from Vineyard Wind.
The 600 megawatt Duane Arnold Energy Center just outside Cedar Rapids, Iowa could be the next shuttered nuclear plant to come back from the dead. The plant’s owner, NextEra, is evaluating a restart, CEO John Ketchum told investors on an earnings call yesterday. “It goes without saying, there’s very strong interest from customers, data-center customers in particular, in that site,” Ketchum said. “We’re in a period of substantial power demand.”
Grizzly 399, the world-renowned, 400-pound bear that roamed Grand Teton National Park for nearly 30 years, died tragically on Tuesday after being hit by a Subaru on the highway. She leaves behind more than a dozen offspring, including a cub born just last year that fans have nicknamed “Spirit.”
Jonathan Steele/Getty Images