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On Exxon’s Venezuela flipflop, SpaceX’s fears, and a nuclear deal spree
With both temperatures and electricity prices rising, many who are using less energy are still paying more, according to data from the Electricity Price Hub.
Two new reports out this week create a seemingly contradictory portrait of the country’s energy transition progress.
Mounting evidence shows that Republican voters are rapidly turning against artificial intelligence.
John Berger’s new company, Otovo, is eyeing a U.S. listing by the end of the year.
Emails raise questions about who knew what and when leading up to the administration’s agreement with TotalEnergies.
The Trump administration justified its nearly $1 billion settlement agreement with TotalEnergies to effectively buy back the French company’s U.S. offshore wind leases by citing national security concerns raised by the Department of Defense. Emails obtained by House Democrats and viewed by Heatmap, however, seem to conflict with that story.
California Representative Jared Huffman introduced the documents into the congressional record on Wednesday during a hearing held by the House Natural Resources Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“The national security justification appears to be totally fabricated, and fabricated after the fact,” Huffman said during the hearing. “DOI committed to paying Total nearly a billion dollars before it had concocted its justification of a national security issue.”
The email exchange Huffman cited took place in mid-November among officials at the Department of the Interior. On November 13, 2025, Christopher Danley, the deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources, emailed colleagues in the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the secretary’s office an attachment with the name “DRAFT_Memorandum_of_Understanding.docx.”
According to Huffman’s office, the file was a document entitled “Draft Memorandum of Understanding Between the Department of the Interior and TotalEnergies Renewables USA, LLC on Offshore Wind Lease OCS-A 0545,” which refers to the company’s Carolina Long Bay lease. (The office said it could not share the document itself due to confidentiality issues.)
While the emails do not discuss the document further, the November date is notable. It suggests that the Interior Department had been negotiating a deal with Total before BOEM officials were briefed on the DOD’s classified national security concerns about offshore wind development.
Two Interior officials, Matthew Giacona, the acting director of BOEM, and Jacob Tyner, the deputy assistant secretary for land and minerals management, have testified in federal court that they reviewed a classified offshore wind assessment produced by the Department of Defense on November 26, 2025, and then were briefed on it again by department officials in early December. They submitted this testimony as part of a separate court case over a stop work order the agency issued to the Coastal Virginia Offshore wind project in December.
“After my review of DOW’s classified material with a secret designation,” Giacona wrote, “I determined that CVOW Project’s activities did not adequately provide for the protection of national security interests,” leading to his decision to suspend ongoing activities on the lease.
Giacona and Tyner are copied on the emails Huffman presented on Wednesday, indicating that the memorandum of understanding between Total and the Interior Department had been drafted and distributed prior to their reviewing the classified assessment.
The final agreement both parties signed on March 23, however, justifies the decision by citing a series of events that it portrays as taking place after officials learned of the DOD’s national security concerns.
The Interior Department paid Total out of the Judgment Fund, a permanently appropriated fund overseen by the Treasury Department with no congressional oversight that’s set aside to settle litigation or impending litigation. The final agreement describes the background for the settlement, beginning by stating that the Interior Department was going to suspend Total’s leases indefinitely based on the DOD’s classified findings, which “would have” led Total to file a legal claim for breach of contract. Rather than fight it out in court, Interior decided to settle this supposedly impending litigation, paying Total nearly $1 billion, in exchange for the company investing an equivalent amount into U.S. oil and gas projects.
But if the agency had been negotiating a deal with Total prior to being briefed on the national security assessment, it suggests that the deal was not predicated on a threat of litigation. During the hearing, Eddie Ahn, an attorney and the executive director of an environmental group called Brightline Defense, told Huffman that this opens the possibility for a legal challenge to the deal.
I should note one hiccup in this line of reasoning. Even though Interior officials testified that they were briefed on the Department of Defense’s assessment on November 26, this is not the first time the agency raised national security concerns about offshore wind. When BOEM issued a stop work order on Revolution Wind in August of last year, it said it was seeking to “address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.”
During the hearing, Huffman called out additional concerns his office had about the settlement. He said the amount the Interior Department paid Total — a full reimbursement of the company’s original lease payment — has no basis in the law. “Federal law sets a specific formula for the compensation a company can get when the government cancels an offshore lease,” he said, adding that the settlement was for “far more.” He also challenged a clause in the agreement that purports to protect both parties from legal liability.
Huffman and several of his fellow Democrats also highlighted the Trump administration’s latest use of the Judgment Fund — to create a new $1.8 billion legal fund to issue “monetary relief” to citizens who claim they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration, such as those charged in connection with the January 6 riot.
“Now we know that that was just the beginning,” Maxine Dexter of Oregon said. “This president’s fraudulent use of the judgment fund is the most consequential and damning abuse of taxpayer funds happening right now.”
The effort brings together leaders of four Mountain West states with nonprofit policy expertise to help speed financing and permitting for development.
Geothermal is so hot right now. And bipartisan.
Long regarded as the one form of electricity generation everyone in Washington can agree on (it’s both carbon-free and borrows techniques, equipment, and personnel from the oil and gas industry), the technology got yet another shot in the arm last week when leading next-generation geothermal company Fervo raised almost $2 billion by selling shares in an initial public offering.
Now, a coalition of western states and nonprofits is coming together to work on the policy and economics of fostering more successful geothermal projects.
Governor Jared Polis of Colorado and Governor Spencer Cox of Utah will announce the formation of the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium this afternoon at a press conference in Salt Lake City.
The consortium brings together governors, regulators, and energy policy staffers from those two states and their Mountain West neighbors Arizona and New Mexico, along with staffing and organizational help from two nonprofits, the Center for Public Enterprise and Constructive, both of which employ former Department of Energy staffers.
The consortium will help coordinate permitting, financing, and offtake agreements for geothermal projects. This could include assistance with permitting on state-level issues like water usage, attracting public dollars to geothermal projects, and upgrading geophysical data to guide geothermal development.
Michael O’Connor, a former DOE staffer who worked on the department’s geothermal programs, is the director of the consortium. He told me that the organization has done financial and geotechnical modeling to entice funding for earlier stage geothermal development that traditional project finance investors have seen as too high-risk.
“We think that the public sector should be a part of the capital stack, and so what we’re trying to do is build investment programs that leverage the state’s ability to provide the early concessionary capital and match that with private sector capital,” O’Connor said. “The consortium has done a whole bunch of financial modeling around this, and we’re now working with energy offices to build that into actual programs where they can start funding.”
The consortium is also trying to make it easier for utilities to agree to purchase power from new geothermal developments, O’Connor said. This includes helping utilities model the performance of geothermal resources over time so that they can be included more easily in utilities’ integrated resource plans.
“Most Western utilities either have no data to incorporate geothermal into their IRPs, or the data they’re using is generalized and 15 years old,” O’Connor told me. This type of data is easy to find for, say, natural gas or solar, but has not existed until recently for geothermal.
“Offtakers want the same kind of assurance that infrastructure investors want,” O’Connor said. “Everyone wants a guaranteed asset, and it takes a little bit more time and effort.”
The third area the consortium is working on is permitting. Many geothermal projects are located on land managed by the Bureau of Land Management, and therefore have to go through a federal permitting process. There are also state-specific permitting issues, most notably around water, a perennially contentious and complicated issue in the West.
How water is regulated for drilling projects varies state by state, creating an obstacle course that can be difficult for individual firms to navigate as they expand across the thermally rich intermountain west. “You’re always working with this sort of cross-jurisdictional permitting landscape,” Fervo policy chief Ben Serrurier told me. “Anytime you’re going to introduce a new technology to that picture, it raises questions about how well it fits and what needs to be updated and changed.”
Fervo — which sited its flagship commercial geothermal plant in Cape Station, Utah — has plenty of experience with these issues, and has signed on as an advisor to the consortium. “How do we work with states across the West who are all very eager to have geothermal development but, aren’t really sure about how to go about supporting and embracing, encouraging this new resource?” Serrurier asked. “This is policymakers and regulators in the West, at the state level, working together towards a much broader industry transformation.”
The Center for Public Enterprise, a consortium member think tank that works on public sector capacity-building, released a paper in April sketching out the idea for the group and arguing that coordinated state policy could bring forward projects that have already demonstrated technological feasibility. The paper called for states to “create new tools to support catalytic public investment in and financing for next-generation geothermal.”
Like many geothermal policy efforts, the geothermal consortium is a bipartisan affair that builds on a record of western politicians collaborating across party lines to advance geothermal development.
“There is sort of this idea that the West is an area that we collectively are still building, and there is still this idea of collaboration against challenging elements and solving unique problems,” Serrurier said.
Cox, a Republican, told Heatmap in a statement: “Utah is working to double power production over the next decade and build the energy capacity our state will need for generations. Geothermal energy is a crucial part of that future, and Utah is proud to be a founding member of the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium.”
Polis, a Democrat, said, “Colorado is a national leader in renewable energy, and geothermal can provide always-on, clean, domestic energy to power our future. Colorado is proud to partner on a bipartisan basis with states across the region to found the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium.”
O’Connor concurred with Fervo’s Serrurier. “Western states are better at working together on ’purple issues’ than most states,” he told me.
In this moment, O’Connor said, the issue at hand is largely one of coordinating and harmonizing across states, utilities, and developers. “Several pieces of good timing have fallen upon the industry at this moment, which has led to a positive news cycle,” he told me. “Making sure that gets to scale now means we have to solve thorny or bigger dollar problems — and that’s why we’re here.
“We’re not an R&D organization,” he added, referring to the consortium. “We’re here to get over the hurdles of financing and of offtake and of regulatory reform.”
