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:
A double whammy of presidential policies — more OPEC output and historic trade levies — are sending fossil stocks tumbling.
President Donald Trump campaigned on a promise to “drill, baby, drill” and help the American oil and natural gas industry. Executives loved it — the industry gave more than $75 million to Trump’s campaign and its affiliated groups.
Now the trade is blowing up in their faces. This week, the president accomplished two of his biggest goals — and the result has slammed the oil industry and imperiled its near-term future. The U.S. oil and gas industry has now stopped growing — and may even lurch into a recession — and there’s no sign yet that Trump or any of the oilmen surrounding the president have noticed.
The double whammy began on Wednesday, when Trump announced eye-watering tariffs on dozens of countries and trading blocs around the world. The tariffs amount to the largest tax hike on Americans since 1968, according to J.P. Morgan, and they have triggered a meltdown in global markets.
Those tariffs would have been bad enough. But early Thursday morning, the oil cartel OPEC+ announced that it would boost oil production by 411,000 barrels a day next month — far more than expected — which will essentially compress three months of supply increases into one.
This is bad news for U.S. producers, who compete with OPEC’s oil on global markets. But what’s astonishing is that Trump had been the leading voice calling for OPEC+ to boost its supply. Since January, Trump has hectored the cartel to “bring down the price of oil” in order to ease inflation and end the Ukraine war. Now they’re doing so, and it could not come at a worse possible time for the American oil and gas industry.
Since Wednesday, the West Texas crude oil benchmark has fallen by roughly 14%. A barrel of oil now trades at about $62. That is well below the $65 level that oil producers need in order to turn a profit drilling new wells nationwide, according to the most recent Dallas Fed survey of energy companies. It’s so low that it could essentially prohibit any new drilling activity in the United States for the time being.
These two policies have essentially frozen the U.S. oil industry for now, according to Rory Johnston, a longtime oil analyst and the author of the Commodity Context newsletter.
“You’re probably seeing more pauses of initial investment intention than the initial Covid shock. It’s really bamboozling,” Johnston told me. “Everything else is really, really starting to grind to a halt, and you’re not seeing anyone jumping over themselves to ‘drill, baby, drill,’ despite the White House’s claims.”
The week has seen brutal sell-offs for major oil companies and the smaller independents. As of Friday afternoon, shares of Diamondback Energy, a Texas-based oil exploration firm, had lost 20% of their value since Monday. The Dallas-based Matador Resources lost 22% in the same time. The oilfield services giant Halliburton is down 20% on the week and 50% in the past 12 months. Nabors, another oilfield service provider, is down 30% in just the past five days.
The traditional major oil companies have held up only somewhat better. Exxon’s shares are down more than 10%, bleeding at least $55 billion in market value, since the president’s tariff announcement. Occidental Petroleum is down 15% on the week while Chevron is down 13%.
At current prices, new oil drilling could even shut down in the Permian Basin near Midland, Texas — the cheapest part of the country to extract. Oil companies need crude to trade above $61 in order to turn a profit drilling there, according to the Fed survey.
Natural gas prices have also fallen. The benchmark for U.S. gas prices, called Henry Hub, has lost 6% so far in trading on Friday.
Why? There are a few big drivers. Although oil and natural gas imports are technically exempt from President Trump’s most recent tariffs, they haven’t been spared from the macroeconomic fallout. If the tariffs lead to a global downturn, which J.P. Morgan analysts now believe is more likely than not, then oil demand will fall.
Worse for the industry is that Trump’s tariffs are hitting the parts of the world where oil demand is projected to grow in the near term. He has slammed six Southeast Asian countries with very high levies, including a 46% tariff on Vietnam and a blistering 49% tariff on Cambodia.
Those tariffs could slow or reverse those economies’ growth, dinging their hunger for oil. As of last year, Southeast Asia was projected to make up more than 25% of energy demand growth over the next decade, with oil demand alone projected to grow by 28%.
“The macro concern is that if these tariffs stay where they are, this is in a global recession, if not a depression-making place,” Johnson added. “And given that the highest tariff rates are on Asia in particular, and that’s where all growing oil demand is, it’s not good for oil.”
And that’s not all. The tariffs mean that the American oil industry is already paying higher costs for key industrial inputs needed to drill more wells. Drilling for oil and gas takes plenty of physical equipment — steel pipe, motors, condensers, valves, and more — and a large share of those goods come from overseas. Since Trump imposed a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum last month, drillers have watched the price of tubular steel pipe rise by roughly 30%, Johnston said.
“I think the tariffs have this demand hit, but there’s also this supply challenge. Particularly here in the U.S., the cost of doing anything or getting more investment is just skyrocketing,” Rachel Ziemba, a macroeconomic analyst and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, told me.
“From a U.S. production standpoint, there’s this view that we weren’t going to see the same additional supplies out of the U.S. that President Trump and his team have been hoping for,” she said.
These three factors explain much of the current pandemonium. But Trump’s trade policies are also wreaking havoc in oil markets simply by making the global economy weaker. By slowing global trade, Trump will reduce demand for oil — regardless of any other effect that the tariffs might have.
“Oil is so integral to the global economy. You can try to carve oil out, and you can try to carve direct inputs for production out, but if you have these other tariffs that impact trade flows — well, trade means oil. You’re gonna impact shipping — that’s oil as well,” Arnab Datta, the managing director of policy implementation at Employ America, a nonpartisan think tank, told me.
The natural gas industry could also eventually pay for the tariff chaos. The countries and trading blocs most likely to import liquified natural gas — including the European Union, China, and the Southeast Asian countries — have also been hit hardest by the president’s trade levies. Natural gas companies have yet to announce a single new supply contract so far this year, Ziemba said.
It’s possible that the president eventually tries to secure a long-term LNG purchase agreement with countries as a way to wind down the tariffs, she added. During the first Trump administration, China agreed to buy a fixed amount of soybeans from the United States, although it ultimately made none of the promised $200 billion in export purchases.
So far, oil executives have praised the president or stayed silent, even as their shares have collapsed. But when given an opportunity to speak anonymously, they have slammed the administration’s policies.
“The administration's chaos is a disaster for the commodity markets. ‘Drill, baby, drill’ is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry. Tariff policy is impossible for us to predict and doesn't have a clear goal,” one executive told the Dallas Fed last month, before the most recent round of trade levies were announced. “I have never felt more uncertainty about our business in my entire 40-plus-year career,” said another.
One struggle for the fossil fuel industry — and for the broader market — is that the federal government has now lost credibility with global investors that it won’t pursue a reckless tariff policy in the future, Datta added.
“There’s no confidence they won’t change again,” he said. “How do we get out of this chaotic environment? I don’t think we can.”
Log in
To continue reading, log in to your account.
Create a Free Account
To unlock more free articles, please create a free account.
The Senate’s reconciliation bill essentially repeals the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, abolishing fines for automakers that sell too many gas guzzlers.
A new provision in the Senate reconciliation bill would neuter the country’s fuel efficiency standards for automakers, gutting one of the federal government’s longest-running programs to manage gasoline prices and air pollution.
The new provision — which was released on Thursday by the Senate Commerce Committee — would essentially strip the government of its ability to enforce the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, or CAFE standards.
The CAFE rules are the government’s main program to improve the fuel economy of new cars and light-duty trucks sold in the United States. Over the past 20 years, the rules have helped push the fuel efficiency of new vehicles to record highs even as consumers have adopted crossovers and SUVs en masse.
But the Republican reconciliation bill would essentially end the program as a practical concern for automakers. It would set all fines issued under the program to zero, stripping the government of its ability to punish automakers that sell too many polluting vehicles.
“It would essentially eviscerate the standard without actually doing so directly,” Ann Carlson, a UCLA law professor who led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration from 2022 to 2023, told me.
“It says that, ‘We have standards here, but we don’t care if you comply or not. If you don’t comply, we’re not going to hold you responsible,’” she said.
Representatives for the Senate Commerce Committee did not respond to an immediate request for comment. A talking points memo released by the committee on Thursday said that the new bill would “[bring] down automobile prices modestly by eliminating CAFE penalties on automakers that design cars to conform to the wishes of D.C. bureaucrats rather than consumers.”
Since 1975, Congress has required the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (pronounced NIT-suh) to set annual fuel efficiency standards for new cars and light trucks sold in the United States. The rules generally require new vehicles sold nationwide to get a little more fuel efficient, on average, every year.
The rules have remained in effect — with varying levels of stringency — for 50 years, although they have generally encouraged automakers to get more efficient since Congress strengthened the law on a bipartisan basis in 2007.
In model-year 2023, the most recent period for which data is available, new cars and light trucks achieved a real-world fuel economy of 27.1 miles per gallon, an all-time high. The vehicle fleet was set to hit another record high in 2024, according to last year’s report.
Opponents of the fuel economy rules argue that the regulations increase the sticker price of new cars and trucks and push automakers to build less profitable vehicles. The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that published Project 2025, has called the rules a “backdoor EV mandate.”
The rules’ supporters say that the standards are necessary because consumers don’t take fuel costs — or the environmental or public health costs of air pollution — into account when buying a vehicle. They say the rules keep gasoline prices low for all Americans by encouraging fuel efficiency across the board.
The strict Biden-era rules were projected to save consumers $23 billion in gasoline costs, according to an agency analysis. The American Lung Association said that the rules would prevent more than 2 million pediatric asthma attacks and save hundreds of infant lives by 2050.
Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy has targeted the fuel economy rules as part of a wide-ranging effort to roll back Biden-era energy policy. On January 28, as his first official act, Duffy ordered NHTSA to retroactively weaken the rules for all cars and light trucks sold after model-year 2022.
On Friday, Duffy separately issued a legal opinion that would restrict NHTSA’s ability to include electric vehicles in its real-world estimates of the country’s fuel economy rules. The opinion sets up the next round of CAFE rules to be considerably weaker than existing law.
But the new Republican reconciliation bill, if adopted, would render those rules moot.
Under current law, automakers must pay a fine when the average fuel economy of the vehicles they sell exceeds the fuel economy standard set for that year. Automakers can avoid paying that penalty by buying “credits” from other car companies that have done better than the rules require.
The fine’s size is set by a formula written into the law. That calculation includes the number of cars sold above the fuel-economy threshold, how much those cars exceeded it, and a $5 multiplier. The GOP tax bill rewrites the law to set the multiplier to zero dollars.
In essence, no matter how much an automaker exceeds the fuel economy rules, the GOP reconciliation bill will now multiply their fine by zero.
The original CAFE law contains a second formula allowing the government to set even higher penalties if doing so would achieve “substantial energy conservation.” The new reconciliation bill sets the multiplier in this formula, too, to zero dollars.
The CAFE law’s penalties can be significant. The automaker Stellantis, which owns Fiat and Chrysler, recently paid more than $426 million in penalties for cars sold from model year 2018 to 2020. Last year, General Motors paid a $38 million fine for light trucks sold in model year 2020.
The CAFE provision in the GOP mega-bill seems designed to skirt past the Byrd rule, a Senate rule that policies in reconciliation bills must affect revenue, spending, or generally have more than a “merely incidental” effect on the federal budget.
But Carlson, the former NHTSA acting administrator, doubted whether the provision should really survive a Byrd bath.
Zeroing out the fines is “not really about revenue,” she said, but about compliance with the law. “This is a way to try to couch repeal of CAFE in revenue terms instead of doing it outright.”
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Nassau County, New York – Opponents of Equinor’s offshore Empire Wind project are now suing to stop construction after the Trump administration quietly lifted its stop-work order.
2. Somerset County, Maryland – A referendum campaign in rural Maryland seeks to restrict solar development on farmland.
3. Tazewell County, Virginia – An Energix solar project is still in the works in this rural county bordering West Virginia, despite a restrictive ordinance.
4. Allan County, Indiana – This county, which includes portions of Fort Wayne, will be holding a hearing next week on changing its current solar zoning rules.
5. Madison County, Indiana – Elsewhere in Indiana, Invenergy has abandoned the Lone Oak solar project amidst fervent opposition and mounting legal hurdles.
6. Adair County, Missouri – This county may soon be home to the largest solar farm in Missouri and is in talks for another project, despite having a high opposition intensity index in the Heatmap Pro database.
7. Newtown County, Arkansas – A fifth county in Arkansas has now banned wind projects.
8. Oklahoma County, Oklahoma – A data center fight is gaining steam as activists on the ground push to block the center on grounds it would result in new renewable energy projects.
9. Bell County, Texas – Fox News is back in our newsletter, this time for platforming the campaign against solar on land suitable for agriculture.
10. Monterey County, California – The Moss Landing battery fire story continues to develop, as PG&E struggles to restart the remaining battery storage facility remaining on site.
A conversation with Biao Gong of Morningstar
This week’s conversation is with Biao Gong, an analyst with Morningstar who this week published an analysis looking at the credit risks associated with offshore wind projects. Obviously I wanted to talk to him about the situation in the U.S., whether it’s still a place investors consider open for business, and if our country’s actions impact the behavior of others.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
What led you to write this analysis?
What prompted me was our experience in assigning [private] ratings to offshore wind projects in Europe and wanted to figure out what was different [for rating] with onshore and offshore wind. It was the result of our recent work, which is private, but we’ve seen the trend – a lot of the big players in the offshore wind space are kind of trying to partner up with private equity firms to sell their interests, their operating offshore wind assets. But to raise that they’ll need credit ratings and we’ve seen those transactions. This is a growing area in Europe, because Europe has to rely on offshore wind to achieve its climate goals and secure their energy independence.
The report goes through risks in many ways, including challenging conditions for construction. Tell me about the challenges that offshore wind faces specifically as an investment risk.
The principle behind offshore wind is so different than onshore wind. You’re converting wind energy to electricity but obviously there are a bunch of areas where we believe it is riskier. That doesn’t mean you can’t fund those projects but you need additional mitigants.
This includes construction risk. It can take three to five years to complete an offshore wind project. The marine condition, the climate condition, you can’t do that [work] throughout the year and you need specialized vehicles, helicopters, crews that are so labor intensive. That’s versus onshore, which is pre-fabricated where you have a foundation and assemble it. Once you have an idea of the geotechnical conditions, the risk is just less.
There’s also the permitting process, which can be very challenging. How do you not interrupt the marine ecosystem? That’s something the regulators pay attention to. It’s definitely more than an onshore project, which means you need other mitigants for the lender to feel comfortable.
With respect to the permitting risk, how much of that is the risk of opposition from vacation towns, environmentalists, fisheries?
To be honest, we usually come in after all the critical permitting is in place, before money is given by a lender, but I also think that on the government’s side, in Europe at least, they probably have to encourage the development. And to put out an auction for an area you can build an offshore wind project, they must’ve gone through their own assessment, right? They can’t put out something that they also think may hurt an ecosystem, but that’s my speculation.
A country that did examine the impacts and offer lots of ocean floor for offshore is the U.S. What’s your take on offshore wind development in our country?
Once again, because we’re a rating agency, we don’t have much insight into early stage projects. But with that, our view is pretty gloomy. It’s like, if you haven’t started a project in the U.S., no one is going to buy it. There’s a bunch of projects already under construction, and there was the Empire Wind stop order that was lifted. I think that’s positive, but only to a degree, right? It just means this project under construction can probably go ahead. Those things will go ahead and have really strong developers with strong balance sheets. But they’re going to face additional headwinds, too, because of tariffs – that’s a different story.
We don’t see anything else going ahead.
Does the U.S. behaving this way impact the view you have for offshore wind in other countries, or is this an isolated thing?
It’s very isolated. Europe is just going full-steam ahead because the advantage here is you can build a wind farm that provides 2 or 3 gigawatts – that’s just massive. China, too. The U.S. is very different – and not just offshore. The entire renewables sector. We could revisit the U.S. four or five years from today, but [the U.S.] is going to be pretty difficult for the renewables sector.