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While the surge in gasoline costs “likely peaked,” Secretary of Energy Chris Wright warned that the price at the pump could remain above $3 a gallon until 2027 during an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday.
The Trump administration pitched its deal to pay TotalEnergies nearly $1 billion to cancel the company’s offshore wind leases as a win-win: The government would reimburse the French energy giant for every penny it spent to acquire the leases, and in exchange, Total would “redirect” the money to U.S. oil and gas development. But new document released Friday and analyzed by Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo show that “Americans’ side of the bargain appears to be worthless” given that “Total did not have to make any new investments to get its check.” Indeed, the company was already planning investments in the U.S. that would likely qualify under the deal.
Offshore wind investments are, meanwhile, moving forward. Danish developer Orsted has installed the first wind turbine at its Sunrise Wind project off the coast of New York, offshoreWIND.biz reported. The turbine is the first of what’s expected to be 84 turbines totaling nearly a gigawatt of maximum capacity. It comes just weeks after Wind Scylla, the Cadeler-owned vessel specially designed to deploy turbines, completed work on Revolution Wind, Orsted’s flagship first project off the coast of Rhode Island. That the project is moving ahead as normal is a victory unto itself. The Trump administration pulled out every stop to halt construction of all offshore wind projects.
The Supreme Court ruled Friday that energy companies facing lawsuits over environmental damage to the Louisiana waterfront from oil and gas production can move those cases from state to federal court, where more favorable outcomes are expected. In a unanimous decision in favor of Chevron, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “Congress has long authorized” the transfer from state to federal courts. The New York Times described the ruling as “a significant victory for oil companies.”
The decision comes two months after the Supreme Court agreed to hear Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, which concerns jurisdiction for “public nuisance” claims. It’s still awaiting a hearing date. But the litigation, which dates back to 2018, came when the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, sued the oil giants Exxon Mobil and Suncor for damages from climate change, bringing charges under state law. “The oil companies tried repeatedly to get the case dismissed, arguing that it belonged in federal court. But time and again, the courts disagreed. The Supreme Court already rejected an earlier petition to review the question of whether the case belonged in state or federal court in 2023,” Emily wrote in February. “Now it has agreed to consider a slightly different petition, filed last summer, over whether federal law preempts Boulder’s state-law claims.”
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Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has agreed to work with the state of Indiana to build out “a future pathway for nuclear energy solutions” including “small modular reactors and other advanced nuclear technologies.” The drugmaker behind antidepressant Prozac and erectile dysfunction treatment Cialis signed a letter of intent with the state last month. The deal, first reported by Axios on Friday, marks the latest example of a big corporate power user laying out plans for atomic energy investments for something other than data centers. In 2022, the steelmaker Nucor signed a deal with nuclear developer NuScale to explore building a small modular reactor near one of its electric arc furnaces, and last year forged an alliance with The Nuclear Company to consider backing the startup’s efforts to establish a supply chain for building fleets of reactors. In 2023, Dow Chemical inked a deal with X-energy to use the next-generation nuclear developer’s high-temperature gas-cooled reactors to potentially swap out fossil fuels for splitting atoms as its industrial heat source.
Not all is looking rosy for the nuclear industry. Fermi America, the startup led by former Texas Governor Rick Perry and which promised to build a giant data enter complex backed by, isn’t just “faltering, it’s imploding,” according to a report by independent energy journalist Robert Bryce. But other projects are advancing. On Friday, the next-generation reactor startup Kairos Power broke ground on its demonstration project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Then, on Saturday, Bloomberg reported The Nuclear Company was moving forward with a bid to finish construction of either South Carolina's abandoned V.C. Summer nuclear plant or one of two other potential locations in the state.
The Brucutu iron ore mine in southeastern Brazil.ALEXANDRE MOTA/CVRD/AFP via Getty Images
Brazil is racing to develop its critical minerals as the U.S. looks for new sources in the hemisphere that can help Washington loosen China’s grip over the metals. Just how to regulate the nascent industry is a hot topic in Brazilian politics right now. Lawmakers who back left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva are pushing to form a state-owned mining company. In a Sunday post on X, Lula boasted that Brazil “already holds the world’s largest reserve of niobium, the second largest of graphite and rare earths, and the third largest of nickel” — and “only 30% of the mineral potential” is mapped out as of yet. Following the lead of mineral-rich countries in Asia and Africa, Brazil said it would look to make deals for processing and refining. “We will not repeat the role of mere exporters of mineral commodities,” Lula wrote. “We are open to international partnerships that include stages of higher value added and technology transfer.”
That could be an opening for deals with China, which dominates the processing industry. Countries such as Indonesia and Zimbabwe banned exports of raw ore in a bid to capture more of the industrial supply chain. “There are a lot of countries that want something like this right now,” Tim Puko, a minerals analyst at the Eurasia Group, told me on X. “Brazil is one of the few with a good chance of pulling it off.”
Japan may be facing record gas prices as the Iran War squeezed shipments of liquified natural gas. But it’s got some backup coming onto the grid from two sources of clean firm power. Unit 6 of the Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, a 1,356-megawatt Advanced Boiling Water Reactor shut down after Fukushima, has resumed commercial operation, World Nuclear News reported. Furusato Thermal Power has announced that the roughly 5-megawatt Waita No. 2 geothermal power plant, located in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, has officially started commercial operations, just two years after construction started, ThinkGeoEnergy reported.
Editor's note: This article was updated after publication to include other sites The Nuclear Company is considering in South Carolina.
The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management posted the settlement agreements for the two cancelled leases to its website on Friday. The documents make it clear that Total did not have to make any new investments to get its check.
“Following their new investment,” the Interior Department’s March 23 press release had said, “the United States will reimburse the company dollar-for-dollar, up to the amount they paid in lease purchases for offshore wind.” But the settlement allows Total to simply submit receipts for oil and gas investments it was already making, including money spent as far back as last November.
The terms required Total to spend the same amount it had spent on the offshore wind leases on “conventional energy projects” within a specific timeframe — between November 18, 2025 and September 30, 2026. “Eligible expenditures” included direct capital expenditures on its own oil and gas projects as well as money funneled through joint ventures. The terms make clear that Total had to actually deploy cash into projects within the timeframe, not just commit to spending it. Once the company spent the money, it could submit a third party audit of its receipts to the Interior Department, and the agency would cancel the leases.
The settlement is also explicit that Total’s outlays for the Rio Grande LNG export terminal, a project the company had reached a final investment decision on last September, were eligible. In the end, Total spent the money — all $928 million of it — in less than 21 weeks. The smaller Carolina Long Bay lease, just east of Wilmington, North Carolina, was officially cancelled on April 2; the Attentive Energy lease, off the coast of Northern New Jersey, was canceled on April 13.
Kit Kennedy, the managing director for power, climate, and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me the inclusion of the Rio Grande project is “another way in which the agreement appears to be a sweetheart deal, or a collusive arrangement.”
Kennedy views the settlement as an attempt to justify compensating the company for not building offshore wind in the U.S. “The irony of handing a billion dollars to this developer at a time when Americans are struggling to pay their electricity bills and struggling to keep afloat,” she said. “To be clear, this billion dollars is coming from us taxpayers, and the net result of these agreements will be to increase electricity bills for Americans.”
TotalEnergies did not respond to emailed questions about the settlement. The Department of Interior did not answer questions directly but submitted a statement that said, "As a result of the certainty provided by the settlement agreements, Total voluntarily accelerated its expenditures on reliable and affordable energy projects that will save money for all Americans and not rely on subsidies from tax-payers to virtue signal.”
The opening section of the settlement tells a story about the circumstances that led to this unusual deal. The Department of Defense had “raised classified national security concerns” about the leases, it says, referring to the classified reports that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum cited when he halted five offshore wind projects last December. The Interior Department “would have” suspended TotalEnergies’ leases indefinitely, too, the settlement says, “similar to” that December suspension order on the five wind projects. Had the agency done that, however, Total “would have claimed breach of contract” and filed a lawsuit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The agency determined that canceling the lease, instead, was “in the public interest.”
The settlement does not mention who suggested the idea of canceling and refunding the lease or when. TotalEnergies’ CEO Patrick Pouyanné has repeatedly asserted that it was the company’s idea. “It came from us — we took the initiative,” Pouyanné told Axios this week.
This narrative seems to imply that the Interior Department warned Total that it was going to pause the company’s leases, or that the company otherwise found out, and Total responded by threatening to file a breach of contract claim.
The Interior Department paid Total with money from the Judgment Fund, a reserve overseen by the Department of Justice that agencies can draw from to pay off settlements arising from litigation or imminent litigation. To Kennedy, there’s still no evidence that the situation with Total qualifies on either ground. “This breach of contract litigation by TotalEnergies, that's totally speculative,” she said. “There's nothing imminent about it. I think those clauses are just an attempt to justify handing over a billion dollars of taxpayer funds in an unauthorized fashion.”
It’s also notable that the settlement references the five offshore wind projects that Trump did pause, considering how that turned out for the administration. Each of the five project developers challenged the stop work orders in court, and the federal judges in those cases rapidly overturned the orders, reasoning they did not find the government’s national security concerns convincing. (The specific concerns raised by that Department of Defense have not been disclosed publicly.)
“DOI is essentially admitting: we were going to break the law and lose in court, so how about we pay you a billion dollars instead,” Elizabeth Klein, the former director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, told me.
Jeff Thaler, an energy and environmental attorney at the firm Preti Flaherty, pointed out that the settlement agreement also seems to sidestep a key legal requirement. The U.S. statute governing Total’s offshore wind lease says cancellation of the lease can occur at any time, “if the Secretary determines, after a hearing,” that the project would cause harm to the environment or to national security. (Emphasis added.)
“There's been no hearing here, right?” Thaler told me. “One could argue, if there's litigation, that they haven't followed the process correctly.”
Secretary Burgum will be testifying in front of the House Appropriations Committee on Monday morning, where Democratic lawmakers have said they will question him about the deal.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include comment from the Interior Department.
