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The Department of Energy is giving the green light to Project Cypress, a cluster of facilities in southwest Louisiana that will filter carbon dioxide directly from the air and store it underground. The agency announced Wednesday that it will award the project $50 million for the next phase of its development, which will be matched by $51 million in private investment.
Before receiving any money, the Project Cypress team had to reach an agreement with the DOE regarding how they would engage with community and labor stakeholders. The result, also released Wednesday, was a series of commitments — for example, to assemble a community advisory board, to partner with local workforce development organizations, and to create a public website with project information.
The developers have yet to provide a list of more concrete, measurable benefits the project will bring to the community. This was more like a plan to make a plan that will have robust community input. That the project sits near Lake Charles, home to some of the most contested energy projects in the country, will not make the next steps easy, however.
The funding is part of a $3.5 billion program authorized by Congress in the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to create four such “direct air capture hubs” around the country in an effort to help commercialize the nascent technology. This is the first award the DOE has handed out after selecting Project Cypress last August as one of two hubs it would consider supporting. A second hub under development by Occidental Petroleum in South Texas is still in negotiations with the agency and has yet to receive funding.
Once it’s fully operational, Project Cypress is designed to capture 1 million tons of carbon from the air per year, employing two different technological approaches to do so.
The first, developed by the Swiss startup Climeworks, uses fans to draw air into metal boxes containing a material called a sorbent that attracts carbon dioxide molecules. Then it heats the sorbent, which releases the CO2 so that it can be stored.
The second approach, pioneered by a California-based company called Heirloom, involves crushing and cooking limestone so that it becomes calcium oxide, a white powder that’s thirsty for CO2. Heirloom lays the powder out on trays, where it binds with carbon dioxide in the air. Then it bakes the powder in an electric kiln to remove the CO2.
Both companies say they will use renewable energy to power their respective processes. To lock the carbon away underground, they are partnering with a company called Gulf Coast Sequestration which has applied for permits to drill two CO2 storage wells on a vast, privately-owned cattle and horse ranch in West Calcasieu Parish. After the carbon is captured, it will be liquified and delivered by pipeline to a well, where it will be injected into porous sandstone about 10,000 feet below the Earth’s surface.
With this award, the project will enter the second of four implementation phases, during which the companies will finalize the project’s design, engage with area residents and stakeholders to complete a community benefits plan, and start on the permitting process.
Phase two will not be quick — it’s expected to last two to three years. Then the companies will begin negotiating with the DOE for funding for phases three — construction — and four — the ramp-up to full-scale operation. The DOE has structured the DAC Hubs program with off-ramps at the start of each phase, allowing the agency to deny additional funding to a project if it finds that it is not meeting previously agreed-upon objectives. But if all goes well, Project Cypress is eligible for up to $600 million.
The Carbon Removal Alliance, a group that lobbies for policies to support what it calls “high quality carbon removal,” sees this award as a “fresh start” for the Department of Energy in that it shows the agency moving beyond its traditional role of funding research and development to commercializing technologies.
“With official funding beginning to flow into states like Louisiana and backed by robust community benefits plans to ensure the highest standards, we’re about to see how technologies like direct air capture can provide positive benefits to our economies and environment,” said Giana Amador, the executive director of the Carbon Removal Alliance.
Members of the community, however, are skeptical that the project will benefit them.
The industrial history of Calcasieu Parish is both an asset and a curse for Project Cypress. The area is home to a high concentration of refineries, petrochemical plants, and liquified natural gas terminals. The developers chose the location because it had a local workforce with relevant skills and the right geology to trap carbon underground, but the residents’ trust will be hard-won after decades of living in one of the most polluted corridors in the country, where news of toxic spills and leaks is common. Many residents have spent the last few years furiously fighting the buildout of several new LNG plants that are expected to increase pollution even more.
One of those activists is James Hiatt, a former refinery worker based in Sulphur, Louisiana. About a year ago, Hiatt founded a group called For A Better Bayou because he wanted to build a grassroots movement to reimagine the future of Louisiana — to be for something, not just against heavy industry.
“I want people to really imagine and embrace an alternative future for ourselves,” he told me. But to him, direct air capture is not it. “I wish I was so sold on it, like this is the way forward and I could get behind it and we could be like oh yeah, let's do this,” he told me. “But it just does not add up for me.”
When the project developers and the DOE held a meeting for stakeholders last November, Hiatt said, even attendees who worked in the oil and gas and petrochemical industries expressed doubts about the plan.
Hiatt shared a few videos from the meeting with me. One speaker questioned whether the jobs created would truly go to people from the area. This is not the first time a company has come in promising jobs and economic growth, only to hire workers from Alabama or Texas. Another speaker called the idea of a community benefits plan a way to “distract the community” from the risks of the project, which the companies have yet to define. (A preliminary list published Wednesday included things like increased traffic and noise during construction, risk of leakage during the transport or storage of the CO2, and energy and water use.) Others implored the companies not to seek property tax breaks, which divert revenue away from schools and social services.
When Project Cypress was first announced, the developers said it would create “approximately 2,300 quality jobs and generate a billion-dollar economic stimulus in the region, with increased opportunities for local contractors, suppliers, and small businesses.” The project also has a stated goal of hiring at least 10% of its workforce from the local fossil fuel and plastics industries.
But beyond that, its intentions are vague. The list of commitments published on Wednesday included lots of plans — i.e., a plan to create a “Site Labor and Workforce Development plan” which will “describe plans to provide equal access to jobs for local residents for construction and operations” — but few concrete actions or outcomes, yet.
Hiatt is especially skeptical that the carbon will stay underground and is worried about leaks. But perhaps more than that, the math of it all doesn’t make sense to him. Project Cypress might capture a million tons of CO2 from the air per year, but Louisiana alone releases more than 200 million tons annually, and is still approving new emissions-intensive facilities like those LNG plants. “Even if we scale this up, we'd have to scale it up orders of magnitude higher than will ever be possible,” he told me. “It doesn't seem like it's worth the time or the money to be doing this when we should be reducing the emissions to start with.”
There are many hurdles to scaling up direct air capture, but overcoming this cognitive dissonance is one of the trickiest. Ultimately, the goal of the project is not to offset Louisiana’s emissions. It’s to demonstrate a technology that could eventually, if we develop the right incentives to support it, clean up carbon that’s already in the atmosphere. But believing in that vision demands that people also see a world where emissions will start to decline — one that’s perhaps not yet apparent in Lake Charles.
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On GM eating the tariffs, California’s utility bills, and open-sourcing climate models
Current conditions: U.S. government forecasters are projecting hurricane season to ramp up in the coming weeks, with as many as nine tropical storms forming in the Caribbean by November • Southern Arizona is facing temperatures of up to 114 degrees Fahrenheit • Northeast India is experiencing extremely heavy rainfall of more than 8 inches in 24 hours.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright said his agency is preparing to rewrite previously published National Climate Assessments, which have already been removed from government websites. In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Wright said the analyses “weren’t fair in broad-based assessments of climate change.” He added: “We’re reviewing them, and we will come out with updated reports on those and with comments on those reports.”
The former chief executive of the fracking company Liberty Energy, Wright once eschewed the outright rejection of climate science that other Trump administration officials espouse. But as the Environmental Protection Agency works to withdraw the legal finding that gave the federal government the right to regulate planet-heating emissions under the Clean Air Act, Wright has ratcheted up his rhetoric. Earlier this week, he claimed that “ceaseless repeating from the media, politicians and activists claiming that climate change is making weather more dangerous and severe is just nonsense.” In response, my colleague Robinson Meyer noted on X: “This is a new and big turn from Secretary Wright. I’ve been pretty careful to never call him a climate change denier because while his claims about the science have been incredibly opinionated, I could see the ‘true’ thing he was trying to say. But this is just brazenly wrong.”
Days after the Department of the Interior revoked a designation opening millions of acres off the United States’ shores to offshore wind, the agency on Thursday launched “a full review of offshore wind energy regulations to ensure alignment” with “America’s energy priorities under President Donald J. Trump.” The review aims to examine “financial assurance requirements and decommissioning cost estimates for offshore wind projects, to ensure federal regulations do not provide preferential treatment to unreliable, foreign-controlled energy sources over dependable, American-made energy,” according to the press release announcing the move.
This is just the latest in a series of actions the administration has taken targeting renewables, particularly wind. For more on Trump’s all-out war against America's biggest source of non-emitting energy, here’s my colleague Jael Holzman.
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The Chevrolet Bolt.Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
General Motors is preparing to import batteries from Chinese giant CATL despite steep tariffs imposed by Trump. The automaker is buying the batteries to power the second-generation Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicle, in what The Wall Street Journal described as “a supply-chain Band-Aid for a company that touts extensive investments in U.S. battery manufacturing.”
The imports are meant to hold GM over for two years until the Detroit giant and its Korean partner LG Energy Solution can complete work on U.S. manufacturing sites to provide a domestic source of lower-cost batteries, according to Journal reporter Christopher Otts. GM’s EV sales surged in July following the introduction of the electric version of the popular Chevrolet Equinox SUV, in one of the brightest spots for the American EV market this summer.
California lawmakers are proposing a radical solution to curb rising electricity rates. Bills moving through the state’s legislature would use money raised from state bonds to help pay for the hugely expensive process of expanding the power grid and upgrading its equipment to better withstand wildfires, Canary Media’s Jeff St. John reported. The legislation would force the state’s big three utilities to accept public financing for a portion of the tens of billions of dollars they plan to spend on the power lines. The proposals come as steep rate hikes across the country become a political hot button ahead of next year’s midterm elections. As Robinson put it, “when you look across the power system, virtually every trend is setting us up for electricity price spikes.”
The sustainability data company Watershed announced a new partnership this morning with the Stanford Sustainable Solutions Lab to preserve the EPA’s model for carbon accounting. Dubbed “Cornerstone,” the project “will be a hub for open access” to software designed to assess Scope 3 emissions, the planet-heating pollution that comes from indirect downstream activities in a supply chain. “By combining the most trusted environmental data models and keeping them open to the world, we hope to help companies and organizations build and maintain momentum on sustainability,” Watershed’s co-founder Christian Anderson said in a statement. Wesley Ingwersen, the former EPA lead and architect behind the federal model, will serve as the initiative’s technical director.
The British government’s decision in May to hand back sovereignty over the Chagos Island to Mauritius more than two centuries after seizing the Indian Ocean archipelago and forcing out its residents to make way for a military base created a political uproar in the United Kingdom earlier this year. But British rule over the island chain yielded at least one major benefit beyond military defense. A new study found that the supersized Marine Protected Area the U.K. established in 2010 protected large ocean animals throughout much of their lifecycle. Scientists tracked sea turtles, manta rays and seabirds in the nearly 250,000-square-mile sanctuary. In total, 95% of tracking locations showed the area “is large enough to protect these wandering animals” which travel far to forage, breed and migrate. By contrast, the study from Exeter and Heriot-Watt universities found that seabirds in marine areas with smaller than 40,000 square miles “would be less well protected.”
Congressional Democrats will have to trust the administration to allow renewables projects through. That may be too big an ask.
How do you do a bipartisan permitting deal if the Republicans running the government don’t want to permit anything Democrats like?
The typical model for a run at permitting reform is that a handful of Republicans and Democrats come together and draw up a plan that would benefit renewable developers, transmission developers, and the fossil fuel industry by placing some kind of limit on the scope and extent of federally-mandated environmental reviews. Last year’s Energy Permitting Reform Act, for instance, co-sponsored by Republican John Barrasso and Independent Joe Manchin, included time limits on environmental reviews, mandatory oil and gas lease sales, siting authority for interstate transmission, and legal clarity for mining projects. That passed through the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee but got no further.
During a House hearing in July, California Representative Scott Peters, a Democrat, bragged that a bill he’d introduced with Republican Dusty Johnson to help digitize permitting had won support from both the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Petroleum Institute — two advocacy groups not typically speaking in harmony. (He’s not the only one taking a crack at permitting reform, though: Another bipartisan House effort sponsored by House Natural Resources Committee chairman Bruce Westerman and moderate Maine Democrat Jared Golden would limit when National Environmental Policy Act-mandated reviews happen, install time limits for making claims, and restrict judicial oversight of the NEPA process.)
But unless Democrats trust the Trump administration to actually allow renewables projects to go forward, his proposal could be dead on arrival. Since the signing of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act on July 4, the executive branch has been on the warpath against renewables, especially wind. With the Trump administration’s blessing, OBBBA restricted tax credits for renewable projects, both by accelerating the phaseout timeline for the credits (projects have until July of next year to start construction, or until the end of 2027 to be placed in service) and by imposing harsh new restrictions on developers’ business relationships with China or Chinese companies. Mere days after he signed the final bill into law, Trump directed the Internal Revenue Service to write tougher guidance governing what it means to start construction, potentially narrowing the window to qualify still further.
“I think all of this fuzz coming out of the Trump administration makes trust among Democrats a lot harder to achieve,” Peters told me this week.
In recent weeks, Trump’s Department of the Interior has issued memos calling for political reviews of effectively all new renewables permits and instituting strict new land use requirements that will be all but impossible for wind developments to meet. His Department of Transportation, meanwhile, insinuated that the department under the previous administration had ignored safety concerns related to radio frequencies while instituting onerous new setback requirements for renewables development near roadways.
Peters acknowledged that bipartisan permitting reform may be a heavy lift for his fellow Democrats — “a lot of Democrats didn’t come to Congress to make permitting oil and gas easier,” he told me — but that considering the high proportion of planned projects that are non-emitting, it would still be worth it to make all projects move faster.
That said, he conceded that his argument “loses a lot of force” if none of those planned non-emitting projects that happen to be solar or wind can get their federal permits approved. “How can I even make a deal on energy unless I get some assurance that will be honored by the President?” Peters told me.
Other energy and climate experts broadly supportive of investment-led approaches to combatting climate change still think that Democrats should push on with a permitting deal.
“All of this raises the importance of a bipartisan Congressional permitting reform bill that contains executive branch discretion to deny routine permits for American energy resources,” Princeton professor and Heatmap contributor Jesse Jenkins posted on X. “Seems like there's a lot of reasons for both sides to ensure America's approach to siting energy resources doesn't keep ping-ponging back and forth every four years.”
But permitting reform supporters are aware of the awkward situation the president’s unilateral actions against renewables puts the whole enterprise in.
“The administration’s recent measures are suboptimal policy and no doubt worsen the odds of enacting a technology-neutral permitting reform deal,” Pavan Venkatakrishnan, an infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress, told me.
At the same time, he argued that Democrats should still try to seek a deal, pointing to the high demand for electrons of any type. Not even the Trump administration can entirely choke off demand for renewables, so permitting reform could still be worth doing to ensure that as much as can evade the administration’s booby traps can eventually get built.
“Projects remain at the mercy of a burdensome regulatory regime,” Venkatakrishnan said. “Democrats should remain committed to an ambitious permitting deal — the best way to reduce deployment timelines and costs for all technologies, including solar-and-storage.”
Venkatakrishnan also suggested that Democrats could, in a bipartisan deal, seek to roll back some of the executive branch actions, including the Interior memo subjecting wind and solar to heightened review or the executive order on the definition of “begin construction.” There would be a precedent for such an action — the 2024 Manchin-Barrasso permitting reform bill attempted to scrap the pause on liquified natural gas approvals that the Biden administration had implemented. But then of course, that didn’t ever become law. (Manchin and congressional Republicans were able to clear the way to permitting a specific project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline in a larger bipartisan deal.)
What could unlock a deal, Yogin Kothari, a former congressional staffer and the chief strategy officer of the SEMA Coalition, a domestic solar manufacturing group, told me, would be the Trump administration getting actively involved. “The administration is probably going to have to lead,” Kothari said. “It’s going to be up to folks in the administration to go to the Hill and say, We do need this, and this is what it’s going to mean, and we’re going to implement this in good faith.”
This would require a delicate balancing act — the Trump administration would have to think there’s enough in a deal for their favored energy and infrastructure projects to make it worth perhaps rolling back some of their anti-renewables campaign.
“The administration is going to have to convince Democrats that it’s not permitting reform just for a subset of industries,” i.e. oil, gas, and coal, “but it is really technology neutral permanent reform,” Kothari said. “On the Senate side, it comes down to whether seven Senate Democrats feel like they can trust the admin to actually implement things in a way that is helpful across the board for energy dominance.”
One reason the administration itself may have to make commitments is because Congressional Democrats may not trust Republicans to stand behind legislation they support and vote for, Peters told me.
“Obviously we’d have to get some face-to-face understanding that if we make a deal, they’re going to live by the deal,” he said.
Peters pointed to the handful of Republicans who successfully negotiated for a longer runway for renewable tax credits, only to see Trump move almost immediately to tighten up eligibility for those tax credits as reason enough for skepticism. He also cited the cuts to previously agreed-upon spending that the Trump administration pushed through Congress on a party line vote as evidence that existing law and deals aren’t necessarily stable in Trump’s Washington.
“If we do a deal — Republicans and Democrats in Congress, the House and Senate, get together and make an agreement — we have to have assurance that the President will back us,” Peters told me.
No bipartisan deal is ever easy to come by, but then historically, “everybody lives by it,” he said. “I think that may be changing under this administration, and I think it makes everything tougher.”
And more of the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Sussex County, Delaware – The Trump administration has confirmed it will revisit permitting decisions for the MarWin offshore wind project off the coast of Maryland, potentially putting the proposal in jeopardy unless blue states and the courts intervene.
2. Northwest Iowa – Locals fighting a wind project spanning multiple counties in northern Iowa are opposing legislation that purports to make renewable development easier in the state.
3. Pima County, Arizona – Down goes another solar-powered data center, this time in Arizona.
4. San Diego County, California – A battery storage developer has withdrawn plans to build in the southern California city of La Mesa amidst a broadening post-Moss Landing backlash over fire concerns.
5. Logan and McIntosh Counties, North Dakota – These days, it’s worth noting when a wind project even gets approved.
6. Hamilton County, Indiana – This county is now denying an Aypa battery storage facility north of Indianapolis despite growing power concerns in the region.