You’re out of free articles.
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
Sign In or Create an Account.
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Welcome to Heatmap
Thank you for registering with Heatmap. Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a force reshaping our economy, our politics, and our culture. We hope to be your trusted, friendly, and insightful guide to that transformation. Please enjoy your free articles. You can check your profile here .
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Subscribe to get unlimited Access
Hey, you are out of free articles but you are only a few clicks away from full access. Subscribe below and take advantage of our introductory offer.
subscribe to get Unlimited access
Offer for a Heatmap News Unlimited Access subscription; please note that your subscription will renew automatically unless you cancel prior to renewal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period. We will let you know in advance of any price changes. Taxes may apply. Offer terms are subject to change.
Create Your Account
Please Enter Your Password
Forgot your password?
Please enter the email address you use for your account so we can send you a link to reset your password:
The era of greenwashing is ending. Here’s what’s coming next.
For a while there, oil companies wanted to convince you they were part of the solution to climate change. There was BP rebranding itself as Beyond Petroleum and, as anyone who watched American television in recent years can tell you, ExxonMobil’s investment in algae-based fuels. Dissident shareholders were even able to win board seats at Exxon.
Well, those days are over, sorta.
The profitability of oil majors soared last year as oil prices spiked and Wall Street kept a tight leash on their investments and insisted they send as much money back to their investors as possible. Exxon ditched algae-based fuels and BP is back to being BP — so long, Beyond Petroleum — and is committed to investment in oil and gas. Shareholder resolutions at Chevron and Exxon that would have them limit emissions from their products were defeated at the companies’ shareholder meetings this week by a larger margin than last year.
Exxon’s Chief Executive Darren Woods was dismissive of setting targets for the company’s “Scope 3” emissions, i.e. emissions created from using Exxon’s products, like when drivers burn gas, as opposed to emissions that derive from their extraction or production. “If an energy company discontinues operations to meet Scope 3 targets while the demand for energy remains, consumers can be forced to make do with less energy, pay significantly higher prices, or return to higher-emitting sources,” Woods said.
Two years after the activist fund Engine No. 1 was able to ride a wave of investor discontent with oil majors and win three Exxon board seats, the oil industry has largely wrested control and influence back from activists who want them to reduce their emissions — and are instead under the strict hand of Wall Street investors who are primarily concerned with returns.
But that doesn’t mean oil companies are out of the low carbon investment games. They’re just playing it on their terms.
“Broader conversations between investors and U.S. oil and gas executives have shifted away from Scope 3 considerations over the past year or so, with institutional investors expressing more interest in topics like the potential returns from nascent businesses such as hydrogen and carbon capture as a service, and corporate progress on reducing operational emissions,” according to the energy consulting firm Energy Intelligence.
Just days after Exxon’s management won over its shareholders at its general meeting, it announced a deal with the steel company Nucor to capture and store carbon emitted from a Louisiana site.
In keeping with the profit-minded, investment-skeptical state of the fossil fuel industry these days, oil companies are eager to remind investors they’re doing these deals and investments because they expect to profit from them.
“Our low-carbon projects must be advantaged and deliver competitive returns. The ability of our low-carbon projects to compete successfully for capital is important if the world is going to meet its emissions aspirations,” Woods said in Exxon’s April call with investors.
Besides the recently announced Nucor deal, Exxon’s investments include a carbon capture and storage project with the German chemical company Linde and a planned blue hydrogen facility on the Gulf Coast that would combine hydrogen production from natural gas, carbon capture and storage for both itself and neighboring plants, along with ammonia production.
Exxon “is focusing its efforts in areas that are synergistic with core competencies including carbon capture & storage (CCS), hydrogen, and biofuels,” Morgan Stanley analysts said in a note to clients.
Exxon has projected some $17 billion in “low carbon” investments through 2027. Chevron is planning some $10 billion in investment in similar projects through 2028. While substantial, these companies are still investing in their core business — Exxon said in April it planned to, along with partners, spend an additional $12.7 billion on offshore drilling near Guyana.
Underpinning these investments are not just the belief that they could hedge against reduced oil demand in the future, but also subsidies for carbon capture and storage from the Inflation Reduction Act, which substantially increased tax credits for carbon storage. “Incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act are a positive step forward, although permitting and other regulatory improvements are still needed. Europe, by contrast, policy approach remains far more prescriptive and punitive,” Woods said in the April call. The IRA and the bipartisan infrastructure law included new subsidies for factories and industrial clusters specializing in climate technologies, such as hydrogen and direct air capture. Most of these subsidies have yet to be awarded.
Chevron and Exxon are not the only American energy companies investing in these technologies. Occidental is perhaps the most aggressive, with massive investments in novel direct air capture technology that it seeks to fund — and profit from — by selling credits to companies like Airbus that can’t easily reduce their own emissions. In its most recent earnings call, Occidental executive Robert Jackson said the company “continue[s] to see the voluntary market strong or growing for our CDR sales.” Occidental is also a major investor in NET Power, which is working on its own form of carbon capture for use in gas power plants.
The technology, should it pan out (one plant in Odessa is scheduled to start operating in 2026), could receive a boost from proposed Environment Protection Agency regulations that will essentially force gas-fired plants to use some form of carbon capture and storage. Occidental plans on using NET Power’s technology for its own oil and gas operations and then to help power its planned massive fleet of direct air capture fans, chief executive Vicki Holub said in its earnings call.
But while these oil company investments are in some sense a desired effect of the Biden administration’s carrot-y approach to climate change policy, one thing they are not intended as is any type of transition to a future without oil companies.
In a report laying out its vision for the future of energy and its low carbon business, Exxon projected “all energy sources are projected to remain important through 2050, with oil and natural gas accounting for 55% of the world’s energy mix in 2050.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
On China’s Paris pact with Europe, Trump’s mineral geopolitics, and Google’s CO2 battery bet
Current conditions: The record-setting heat roasting more than 100 million Americans in the central U.S. is now headed for the densely populated Northeast • The American Samoan capital of Pago Pago faces “imminent” flash flooding on Friday amid days of rain • China just set a record for the highest number of hot days since March in its history.
The Palisades nuclear plant on the shore of Lake Michigan.Holtec International
Three years after the Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan became the country’s last atomic power station to permanently close, the facility is set to become the first in U.S. history to reopen after a final shutdown. On Thursday afternoon, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued its formal approval for the plant’s operating license, putting the single-reactor station on track to restart later this year, the plant’s owner, Holtec International, told me. With just 11 days to go before its license expired, Palisades’ previous owner opted to close down May 2022 rather than make necessary upgrades to continue operations. The Biden-era Loan Programs Office at the Department of Energy put up more than $1.5 to fund the effort. Despite freezing funding for other projects, the Trump administration shelled out the money to Holtec.
The project still faces obstacles. Holtec still needs to finalize repairs at the plant, which are subject to another NRC review. Anti-nuclear activists, meanwhile, vowed to appeal the NRC license. Still, Holtec’s President Kelly Trice said the NRC approval “represents an unprecedented milestone in U.S. nuclear energy.”
As the U.S. seeks to dismantle its climate regulations, China and the European Union signed a pledge Thursday to work together on cutting emissions. The document, dubbed “the way forward” following the 10-year anniversary of the Paris climate accords, called the 2015 pact brokered in the French capital “the cornerstone of international climate cooperation” that “all parties” should implement “in a comprehensive, good-faith and effective manner.” The two global powers also reached a deal for the emergency export of rare earth metals from China, which dominates their global trade, to European factories facing shortages of the materials, according to The New York Times.
The diplomatic communique comes as the U.S. goes through the process to quit the Paris Agreement for the second time. In 2017, Trump waited weeks to initiate the exit, and the protocol completed around the time of the 2020 election. That allowed then-President-elect Joe Biden to signal his plans to rejoin immediately, rendering the American withdrawal a brief hiccup. This time, however, the rules allow the U.S. to leave in about a year, and Trump started the process on his first day in office.
Get Heatmap AM directly in your inbox every morning:
Just over a week after the Pentagon made a landmark investment in the United States’ only rare earths mine, President Donald Trump elevated his minerals adviser to the Nation Security Council. While the Trump administration did not confirm what Copley’s new position would entail, an industry source told E&E News the job change was a promotion for the military veteran and former mining executive, who would now serve as “both the White House mineral and supply chain czar.”
The move comes as China has sought to leverage its grip over global supplies of minerals such as rare earth metals and graphite by tightening export restrictions. While Trump’s military investment into California rare earth producer MP Materials may mirror China’s strategy of government funding for critical materials, Beijing has another thing going for it: Strong demand from electric vehicles. Therein lies what Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin recently called the “paradox” of Trump’s mineral policy: He’s making it easier to mine but eliminating the demand pull of electric vehicles and wind turbines.
Google has invested in small modular reactors, nuclear fusion, and even old-fashioned hydropower to shore up a steady supply of electricity for its reactors. This morning, the tech giant announced a strategic investment into carbon dioxide batteries, as I reported earlier today over at Latitude Media. The startup Energy Dome houses its technology in white, inflatable shelters similar to what you see over the courts at professional tennis tournaments. But inside is equipment that compresses and liquefies CO2, stores it in carbon steel tanks, then turns the liquid back into pressurized gas when energy is needed. Once reheated, the carbon dioxide is pumped through turbines to generate electricity for up to 24 hours at a time.
Headquartered in Milan, Energy Dome already had a deal for pilot plants in Wisconsin, Sardinia, and India, about eight hours west of Hyderabad. But Google said it plans to deploy the technology across the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
Maine is speeding up approvals for nearly 1,600 gigawatt-hours of renewable energy to make sure projects can tap into federal tax credits before the Trump administration cracks down, Canary Media's Sarah Shemkus reported. State regulators gave developers a July 25 deadline to take part in the fast-tracking program. The state is seeking enough bids to meet about 13% of its annual electricity demand. The program will give preference to projects sited on property where water or soil is contaminated by toxic PFAS, the cancer-causing substances known as “forever chemicals.”
Not all states are as welcoming of renewables. In Ohio, as Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported yesterday, 26 out of 88 counties have “established restricted areas where wind or solar are prohibited.” The key to getting around local opposition is early community outreach and building a base of support for a project.
Consider the lobster, but listen to the shrimp. A new study in the journal Royal Society Open Science found that listening to the high-frequency sounds snapping shrimp produce “can be used as a real indicator of coral resilience,” Xavier Raick, postdoctoral fellow in bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, said in a press release. “Snapping shrimp’s abundance is a mirror of coral cover. So if you have more corals, especially very big colonies, you have more snapping shrimps, and then you can use their sound as a proxy for the reef, structure, and health.”
Solar and wind projects will take the most heat, but the document leaves open the possibility for damage to spread far and wide.
It’s still too soon to know just how damaging the Interior Department’s political review process for renewables permits will be. But my reporting shows there’s no scenario where the blast radius doesn’t hit dozens of projects at least — and it could take down countless more.
Last week, Interior released a memo that I was first to report would stymie permits for renewable energy projects on and off of federal lands by grinding to a halt everything from all rights-of-way decisions to wildlife permits and tribal consultations. At minimum, those actions will need to be vetted on a project-by-project basis by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and the office of the Interior deputy secretary — a new, still largely undefined process that could tie up final agency actions in red tape and delay.
For the past week, I’ve been chatting with renewables industry representatives and their supporters to get their initial reactions on what this latest blow from the Trump administration will do to their business. The people I spoke with who were involved in development and investment were fearful of being quoted, but the prevailing sense was of near-total uncertainty, including as to how other agencies may respond to such an action from a vital organ of the federal government’s environmental review process.
The order left open the possibility it could also be applied to any number of projects “related to” solar and wind — a potential trip-wire for plans sited entirely on private lands but requiring transmission across Bureau of Land Management property to connect to the grid. Heatmap Pro data shows 96 renewable energy projects that are less than 7 miles away from federal lands, making them more likely to need federal approval for transmission or road needs, and another 47 projects that are a similar distance away from critical wildlife habitat. In case you don’t want to do the math, that’s almost 150 projects that may hypothetically wind up caught in this permitting pause, on top of however many solar and wind projects that are already in its trap.
At least 35 solar projects and three wind projects — Salmon Falls Wind in Idaho and the Jackalope and Maestro projects in Wyoming — are under federal review, according to Interior’s public data. Advocates for renewable energy say these are the projects that will be the most crucial test cases to watch.
“Unfortunately they’ll be the guinea pigs,” said Mariel Lutz, a conservation policy analyst for the Center for American Progress, who today released a report outlining the scale of job losses that could occur in the wind sector under Trump. “The best way to figure out what this means is to have people and projects try or not try various things and see what happens.”
The data available is largely confined to projects under National Environmental Policy Act review, however. In my conversations with petrified developers this past week, it’s abundantly clear no one really knows just how far-reaching these delays may become. Only time will tell.
We’re looking at battles brewing in New York and Ohio, plus there’s a bit of good news in Virginia.
1. Idaho — The LS Power Lava Ridge wind farm is now facing a fresh assault, this time from Congress — and the Trump team now seems to want a nuclear plant there instead.
2. Suffolk County, New York — A massive fish market co-op in the Bronx is now joining the lawsuit to stop Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project, providing anti-wind activists a powerful new ally in the public square.
3. Madison County, New York — Elsewhere in New York, a solar project upstate seems to be galvanizing opposition to the state’s permitting primacy law.
4. Fairfield County, Ohio — A trench war is now breaking out over National Grid Renewables’ Carnation Solar project, as opponents win a crucial victory at the county level.
5. El Paso County, Colorado — I don’t write about Colorado often, but this situation is an interesting one.
6. St. Joseph County, Indiana — Something interesting is playing out in this county that demonstrates how it can be quite complicated to navigate municipal and county-level permitting.
7. Albemarle County, Virginia — It’s rare I get to tell a positive story about Virginia, but today we have one: It is now easier to build a solar farm in the county home to Charlottesville, one of my personal favorite small cities in our country.