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“This is what you’d expect from China,” a veteran mining industry lobbyist told Heatmap.
President Donald Trump is chasing a new American mining boom. In the process, he’s making quick bets on projects that haven’t completed routine financial analyses or would be situated in environmentally sensitive areas with significant legal risk — and occasionally both at the same time.
In March, Trump issued an executive order that changed the landscape of American mining for the foreseeable future, commanding agencies to approve permits for individual mines as quickly as possible and requesting government funds go toward domestic mining. The Interior Department has also taken strides to hasten the environmental review process for mining on federal lands, asserting that it will complete comprehensive analyses in less than 30 days, a truncated time-table the likes of which mining industry lobbyists have long sought.
So far in his second term as president, Trump’s administration has claimed to have approved, expedited, or publicly endorsed at least 28 different mines and mineral exploration projects, according to a review of Bureau of Land Management notices and federal permitting databases, with more likely in the offing. Many of these projects may very well produce minerals required for key energy or defense purposes, and some of them are guaranteed to do so. But at least a few have not yet been proven to be economically viable in the way investors typically expect from mining companies.
Conservationists have decried these actions as an unnecessary risk to sensitive landscapes, which could be irrevocably changed without a guarantee of improved energy security. And even some in the mining industry are quietly noting these examples, saying they could represent a paradigm shift in how America treats the mining industry.
“This is what you’d expect from China,” a former veteran mining industry lobbyist told me, requesting anonymity to protect their current business from retribution. “The U.S. prides itself on mines that are good neighbors. The U.S. doesn’t have a perfect record, but those are things that it values.”
“I’m not saying the companies are going to do something wrong here,” the source continued, “but we don’t know that.”
The most headline-grabbing example of this rush to permit came last week, when the Interior Department said it would fast-track the permitting of a large uranium mine in Utah known as Velvet-Wood. The department said it would complete Velvet-Wood’s environmental review within two weeks — a process that has historically taken years.
On first blush, abbreviating the approval process for a mine that will produce energy fuel for nuclear power plants resembles the sort of permitting reform that climate hawks and centrist policy wonks have craved for years. Velvet-Wood’s developer, Anfield Energy, claims the site will also produce vanadium, a strategic mineral used in defense-grade steel.
A deeper examination, however, exposes signs of haste that go beyond all deliberate speed.
Ordinarily, mines take years to develop for reasons wholly unrelated to the federal permitting process. Usually a project requires years of exploration and study to verify that the area where digging will happen holds proven “resources” and then “reserves.” Think of resources vs. reserves as the difference between lukewarm and high levels of confidence that minerals are not only present but also economic to mine and process. It is unusual for any mine to be built without proven resources, let alone reserves, and feasibility studies are the way companies usually communicate that level of proof to investors. These studies have also been a primary mode of conveying a project’s value and design to the government.
Until our present policy moment, the permitting process was so lengthy that it made little sense to pursue it without first giving investors the certainty brought by a feasibility study. Anfield and other companies appear to have found a work-around to demonstrate that certainty, however, at least to the government: Asking to dig in places where mines used to be decades ago.
Anfield has not yet completed a feasibility study for Velvet-Wood, which would include the site of a former underground uranium mine. The most recent study of the project was a 2023 “preliminary economic assessment” that documented some of the old mining infrastructure and otherwise largely referenced historical data about mineralization. The company stated in the report that the study was “too speculative geologically to have economic considerations applied to them,” and that “there is no certainty that the preliminary economic assessment will be realized.”
In Anfield’s own press release announcing the Trump administration’s decision to quickly permit the project, the company states that it “has not done sufficient work to classify these historic estimates” for uranium and vanadium at the site. Anfield did not respond to requests for comment on why the company requested government permits before finishing a feasibility study.
Under the Velvet-Wood deposit’s previous owner, Russian mining company Uranium One, a draft feasibility study did find economically viable uranium. But that study is more than a decade old and was not made public, according to press materials at the time.
In order to become operational, Anfield expected to have to update the decades-old plan of operations for Velvet-Wood, according to the 2023 economic assessment, which also said BLM would need to take into account the impacts of restarting a formerly operational mine, as well as mining in areas that have not previously been mined before. That’s quite a lot of work to complete in only two weeks. While it’s possible that staff at Interior got a head start on their review when Anfield submitted its mine plan last year, they have not confirmed anything to that effect since the department’s announcement about permitting the project.
Aaron Mintzes, senior policy counsel for the mining reform advocacy group Earthworks, told me the practice of approving a mine before feasibility studies have been done carries the risk of painting a misleading portrait to investors about a project’s viability.
“Every mining company does this. All of them. If you’re a publicly traded mining company and you want investors to give your mine money, you must provide a feasibility study. That’s how you know they’re telling the truth,” Mintzes said of this approach. “Investors should be upset about this.”
In an email, BLM press secretary Brian Hires told me that “feasibility studies are not legally required by BLM for mining projects.”
“The BLM continues to ensure appropriate environmental oversight including coordination with other agencies, balancing mineral development rights and responsible public lands management,” Hires stated.
On Velvet-Wood, Hires said the agency acted under “recently established emergency procedures” created under the Trump administration to quickly approve new resource projects. “The expedited review is expected to significantly contribute to meeting urgent energy demands and addressing key threats to national energy security.”
Velvet-Wood is not the first mine Trump’s Interior Department has expedited so early in the approval process.
On April 8, the Trump administration gave Dateline Resources, an Australian company, a green light to build a large mine inside of the Mojave National Preserve. Like Velvet-Wood, the project, known as Colosseum, got this approval without a feasibility study. Colosseum would be a gold mine, according to Dateline’s website, which also states that the project is “prospective” for producing rare earth elements as a byproduct. The company cites previous radiomagnetic reviews by the U.S. Geological Survey and the project’s proximity of roughly 8 kilometers — or about 6 miles — from an operating rare earths mine, Mountain Pass. The company also cites decades-old information about the site from when it used to be an operating gold mine in the 1970s and 1980s.
Are there rare earths at the Colosseum dig site? There may be — but how much and how commercially useful they’d be are normally determined through a feasibility study process.
BLM approved Colosseum without any new environmental review, or at least nothing that was public at the time it made the decision known. Instead, it said in a five-sentence press statement that Dateline could rely entirely on a construction and operations plan from the previous mine, which shut down in the 1990s.
BLM’s press release also referred to Colosseum as a rare earths mine, with no mention of gold.
“For too long, the United States has depended on foreign adversaries like China for rare earth elements for technologies that are vital to our national security,” the release stated. “By recognizing the mine’s continued right to extract and explore rare earth elements, Interior continues to support industries that boost the nation’s economy and protect national security.”
Hires, the BLM press secretary, told me that the agency made this claim to highlight “the project’s potential to produce rare earth elements, which are required for economic and national security.”
On April 21, investors were informed that a “bankable feasibility study” was now “underway.” But that didn’t stop Trump from jumping far ahead of the usual process a few days later, publicly calling the project “America’s second rare earths mine” on Truth Social.
There’s a big reason this area stopped being mined, by the way: According to the National Park Conservation Association, the area is heavily restricted from mineral development under a law Congress passed in the early 1990s, the California Desert Protection Act.
There is a separate law that provides companies the ability to mine in national preserves and parks under very specific and limited conditions, and with the approval of the National Park Service, the association told me. Kelly Shapiro, an attorney representing Dateline, told E&E News in a story published last week that Interior told the company its mine plan of operations was “valid.” Shapiro also told the news outlet that “rare earths have been found at the Colosseum mine site.”
Dateline has now begun work at the mine site and conservation activists are sounding public alarms. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
Asked why BLM gave Colosseum the right to construct a new operating mine, Hires said the project site, which has not been active for decades, “is not a new mine.” He said the facility was granted the “right” to “continue mining operations” under the plan from when the site was active in the 1980s, which the agency said “includes exploration for rare earth minerals.”
Before I came to Heatmap, I spent years writing about the mining industry. One of the stories I’m proudest of was an investigation into the amount of mining needed to build the vastly different energy and transportation systems we’ll need to fully decarbonize. So I can safely say this: We truly will need more minerals like lithium, copper, nickel, graphite and cobalt to decarbonize, and we might need to open more mines to get them, although recycling and technological innovation could easily reduce the tonnage required over time.
The Trump team has a different argument for mining this much. It says our country needs to wean off foreign sources of metals because relying on imports is a weakness in the eyes of hawkish security experts.
For the past decade, U.S. policymakers of both parties have rallied behind the basic notion that the country should stop relying as much on minerals from nations considered to be adversaries by the national defense apparatus, including China and Russia, as well as companies perceived to be substantially controlled by those nations. The idea first gained traction under Trump 1.0, leading to the creation of a list of so-called “critical minerals” that the military and domestically essential businesses rely on but are generally mined or refined in other countries.
Under Joe Biden, the “critical mineral” concept was magnified by multiple signature laws, including the 2021 infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which together established large grant and tax credit programs intended to stimulate a new American mining economy.
Trump has sped up the federal permitting process for some copper, nickel, and lithium mining and exploration projects. These commodities markets are ones in which China genuinely has an outsized influence, per national security experts, through market share and existing business relationships held by Chinese state-owned mining and refining companies.
Some of these U.S. mining projects likely would’ve been permitted no matter the outcome of last year’s election, either because their environmental impacts would be relatively limited or because they’d produce metals crucial for the energy transition that a Democrat-led government would have supported as a trade-off. Take South32’s Hermosa copper mine in Arizona, which the Biden administration fast-tracked and Trump 2.0 has signaled it will approve. A handful of these mines would supply a meaningful amount of defense minerals for which we currently rely on China, such as the Stibnite gold mine in Idaho, which would yield antimony for military-grade ammo as a byproduct.
Then there are special cases like the Resolution copper mine in Arizona, where the government’s hands are essentially tied under federal legal requirements to approve the conveyance of land to a mining company.
Other “transition metal” mining projects fast-tracked or endorsed by Trump 2.0, however, likely would not have been given priority — or even a second look — under a more neutral federal regulator. That’s because they are located in areas that officials under previous administrations fretted would produce outsized pollution risk and potentially run afoul of environmental laws.
Take for example the NewRange copper mine in Minnesota, which the company says would be the state’s only active copper mine if approved and constructed. NewRange is better known in the mining industry as PolyMet, which was its moniker for most of the nearly two decades it has been in the works. NewRange/PolyMet has struggled to get requisite permits, to the point of being referred to by its opponents as a “zombie” project, because it’s situated in an especially porous area of northern Minnesota covered in protected wetlands.
In 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency under Biden said the Army Corps of Engineers should rescind a water permit issued under Trump 1.0 because the project would violate the pollution standards of the Fond du Lac Tribe, which relies on the wet ecosystem to cultivate wild rice for subsistence and cultural practices.
At the beginning of May, the Trump administration added NewRange/PolyMet to a federal “transparency” dashboard that it says will soon have a timetable for approving the project under the same authority it fast-tracked Resolution. Representative Pete Stauber of Minnesota, whose congressional district includes the mining project, reacted in a statement that said the designation shows Trump “understands the vital importance of this project,” and that he looks forward to “seeing NewRange meet and exceed every permitting standard in a timely manner.”
This is an example of mine that, if approved hastily, would probably create new litigation just as fast.
At the risk of repeating myself, it’s not the only example of such a case, and there are more examples where the Trump administration has opened the door to new, legally risky directions on a mine.
Most notable in that pile is the Pebble mine in Alaska, which Trump halted during his first term but may be given what appears to be a last shot at survival under his new government. Decades of battle between a would-be gold mine and the denizens of Bristol Bay have dominated conversations around American mining. Opponents across the political spectrum have tried to stop the project because they fear construction would pollute the bay and its world-class fishing grounds.
The first Trump administration actually opposed Pebble after a private lobbying campaign by Donald Trump, Jr. and other conservative conservation advocates. Under Biden, the EPA issued a rare veto of the project area under a provision of the Clean Water Act. This was a step beyond simply rejecting the permit as it would, in the view of advocates, be a permanent restriction against development.
In February, the Trump 2.0 Justice Department requested a stay on the federal lawsuit filed against the veto by Pebble’s developer, Northern Dynasty Minerals, alongside top political leaders in the state of Alaska, who have argued that the agency overstepped its authority. On Wednesday, Justice Department attorneys filed a status report asking that the stay be extended for at least another month because while officials had been briefed on the subject, they “require additional time to determine how they wish to proceed.”
This indicates the government is still not ready to state its position, and leaves open a door for the Justice Department to flip sides. Northern Dynasty Minerals hopes a flip will happen. “This is an important position in any negotiation between a project proponent and a regulator, and for a process that could, hopefully, remove the veto and re-start the permitting process,” the company’s CEO Ron Thiessen said in a public statement made after the stay extension request.
It may be that even Pebble Mine is a bridge too far for Trump 2.0. But after all these other projects have gotten the skids greased, we must all wait with bated breath for the next shoe — er, pebble — to drop.
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As bad as previous drafts of the reconciliation bill have been, this one is worse.
Senate Republicans are in the final stages of passing their budget reconciliation megabill — which suddenly includes a new tax on solar and wind projects that has sent many in the industry into full-blown crisis mode.
The proposed tax was tucked inside the latest text of the Senate reconciliation bill, released late Friday night, and would levy a first-of-its-kind penalty on all solar and wind projects tied to the quantity of materials they source from companies with ties to China or other countries designated as adversaries by the U.S. government. Industry representatives are still processing the legislative language, but some fear it would kick in for certain developers as soon as the date of its enactment. Taken together with other factors both in the bill and not, including permitting timelines and Trump’s tariffs, this tax could indefinitely undermine renewables development in America.
On Saturday, as legislators began to digest the new text, Senator Brian Schatz declared on X not once, not twice, but three times that with the new penalty, this bill would on its own “kill” the U.S. solar energy industry, leading to energy shortages and raising costs across the board. "I promise you,” he wrote, “this bill is worse than you think.”
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, a staunch advocate for climate policy, said in a statement to Heatmap that the tax will help China and hurt American families, “all so Republican oil and gas donors can make even bigger profits. This isn’t policy; it’s pay-off.”
Without this new tax, energy companies might’ve quietly swallowed the bitter pill of losing the incentives established in the Inflation Reduction Act. In the weeks since the first version of this legislation was introduced in the House, I’ve interviewed numerous renewables developers, tax attorneys, and cleantech investors, who have emphasized the resilience of the industry given rising energy demand and explained that there would still be many ways for projects currently under development to qualify for the credits before they’d be phased out. The history of renewable energy tax credits in the U.S. is full of of phase-outs and restarts. The industry’s been at least somewhere like this before.
But the withdrawal of incentives is one thing. A targeted federal tax that could increase development costs by up to 20% that is levied over longstanding supply chain relationships that will take not years but rather decades to rebuild is another.
The American Council on Renewable Energy said in a statement that the latest iteration of the bill “effectively takes both wind and solar electric supply off the table, at a time when there is $300 billion of investments underway, and this generation is among the only source of electricity that will help to reduce costs and keep the lights on through the early 2030s.” The North America’s Building Trades Unions issued a statement after the text’s release calling it the “biggest job-killing bill in the history of this county” and adding that that “simply put, it is the equivalent of terminating more than 1,000 Keystone XL pipeline projects.”
“I think it’s impossible to overstate how this new version of the bill makes the House bill look moderate by comparison,” Andrew Reagan, president of Clean Energy 4 America, told me in an exasperated tone over the phone Saturday afternoon. “The hope as I see it is that as the full impact of how devastating this proposal would be for every state in the country comes into play, as this comes to the floor, Senate Republicans who claim to care about this issue come to [Majority Leader John] Thune and ask to amend this.”
The tax would apply to new solar and wind construction and be calculated based on the degree to which a project exceeds statutory limits for materials sourced from “foreign entities of concern,” i.e. Russia, North Korea, Iran, and most especially China. Solar projects would have to pay a 50% tax on the value of the overage, and wind projects would pay 30%.
Here’s a simplified example to illustrate how it would work: Say you are developing a solar project that will begin operating in 2028, and the total cost of all of your material inputs is $100,000. The new law would require that at least 50% of the value of all of your materials come from entities disconnected from Chinese companies and investment (the statutory limit for 2028), but your project is only able to achieve 40%. The extra $10,000 dollars you paid to companies with ties to China would be subject to the 50% solar tax, adding $5,000 to the total cost of your project. And this doesn’t even touch the new expense of capturing and reporting all of this supply chain data for the federal government.
The rules for how developers would actually calculate the value of their various material inputs will be subject to the Treasury’s interpretation and guidance, so it is impossible to determine how harshly this tax would fall on any individual solar or wind energy facility. Even so, Rhodium Group has estimated that it would increase project costs overall by 10% to 20% — a whopping total to eat on top of losing key tax credits.
This penalty for sourcing linked to China dates back to the IRA’s consumer electric vehicle tax credit. As I was first to report years ago for E&E News, Senator Joe Manchin successfully limited the credit’s scope by requiring qualifying cars to be made with an increasing percentage of materials from the U.S. or a country with a free trade agreement and mandating that materials could not come from a foreign entity of concern. This tactic mostly failed to reshore mineral supply chains as quickly Manchin had hoped it would, but it did ensure that relatively few vehicles qualified.
This anti-foreigner approach to energy policy has now been taken up by Republicans in Congress to erode the IRA overall. As my colleagues Emily Pontecorvo and Matthew Zeitlin have explained, the Senate legislation would deny tax credits to companies that have supply chains with any ties to China, which many say would effectively stop them from qualifying for the credits.
This specific policy approach is something I’ve previously dubbed the GOP’s “anti-China trap” for renewable energy. Now, on top of cutting off companies from tax credits, this trap will catch them for failing to reinvent their supply chains overnight with little if any warning. Of course, reshoring these supply chains will also be more difficult because of other provisions in the bill that would erode and eliminate advanced manufacturing tax incentives originally designed to encourage companies to make more of these components at home.
The only silver lining here is that the fight isn’t over. It wouldn’t surprise me to see a senator try to get rid of this tax as the bill moves through the amendment process on the Senate floor.
I expect some sort of intervention here because there appears to be momentum from powerful entities outside of Congress to get rid of this tax. Reviews of this piece of the bill are so bad, it has put the American Clean Power and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on the same side as pro-fossil “philosopher” Alex Epstein, who is also calling on senators to oppose the tax.
“I just learned about the excise tax and it’s definitely not something I would support,” he posted to X yesterday, adding he’d rather they focus on removing the tax credits instead of creating a new cost. “I stand for energy freedom, always, in every situation,” he added in a separate post defending his opposition.
Elsewhere on X yesterday, Elon Musk spent hours (on his birthday, no less) going after the Senate bill, reposting energy wonks’ rants about the bill and its tax on renewables, including from Jesse Jenkins, the host of Heatmap’s very own Shift Key podcast.
So, okay, but will Musk, Epstein or any of these other critics convince at least one senator to force a successful vote on getting rid of the tax? That’s really the only way it can go away, because it’s very likely the Senate will force the House to pass whatever it passes.
I talked to Jenkins hours after Musk reposted him and filled up his replies. Like the iconoclastic billionaire, he told me he thinks this legislation is worse than anything congressional Republicans had released before it. A big reason for that is indeed the excise tax, a completely new idea that hadn’t been in any other previous draft of the bill or debated in committee, which he sees as a “obviously, deliberatively punitive attack on the wind and solar industry for what appears to be purely ideological reasons.”
“It’s going to kill hundreds of billions of dollars in investment and hundreds of gigawatts of new supply that would otherwise help us meet rapidly growing electricity demand. So, yeah, higher energy prices, less jobs, less investment in American energy production, and less confidence in the American business environment,” Jenkins said. “No one is asking for this.”
Debate on the bill is expected to begin later today, and the amendment process will stretch into Monday morning at least.
Additional reporting by Emily Pontecorvo
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a statement from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.
A little-noticed provision would make the payment option used by tax-exempt groups all but impossible to claim.
A little-noticed provision in the Senate tax bill will sabotage the efforts of tribes, rural electric cooperatives, and public power authorities to develop local affordable energy projects by striking a section of the Inflation Reduction Act that enabled tax-exempt groups to claim the clean energy tax credits as direct cash payments from the Treasury.
The IRA included strict domestic sourcing requirements beginning in 2026 for groups utilizing this “direct pay” option on projects larger than 1 megawatt. But the law also created exceptions for cases where domestic components were not available in sufficient quantity or quality, or would increase costs by more than 25%. The Senate bill would get rid of these exceptions.
“It just makes it unlikely for those projects to go forward — or more likely for those projects to go forward with a private developer, instead of with a public utility or a tribe or a rural co-op,” Grace Henley, a tax attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “And so they don’t really do anything to increase the amount of domestic material that would be used, they just hurt the projects that are seeking to invest in clean energy infrastructure for these communities to lower costs.”
Public power and tribal energy advocates warn that without the exceptions, energy development will become impossible for their constituents.
Wind and solar projects being developed by these groups are already threatened by the bill’s rapid phase-out of wind and solar tax credits and its complex rules related to using materials from China. Chèri Smith, the executive director of the Alliance for Tribal Energy, told me that Tribes face longer development timelines than the average private developer. “We have multiple stages of approval that are unique to tribal energy development,” she told me, including lengthy internal consultation processes. The changes to direct pay will put these projects further out of reach, she said.
The Alliance provides free energy development consulting services to more than 100 Tribes. Smith sent me a list of projects in Alaska Native villages, Arizona, California, and Oregon that could be killed by the tax credit changes. “Alaska Native villages face some of the highest energy costs in the country,” she said, largely due to their reliance on diesel generators. Just over a third of the Hopi Tribe in Arizona lacks access to electricity, but now multiple microgrid projects meant to close the gap are at risk. Many of the projects on the list are also doubly threatened by grant cancellations and the repeal of the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
“The bill is particularly harmful to Tribal Nations, pulling the rug out from under projects that would strengthen their energy sovereignty and power local communities,” Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich, Ron Wyden, and Brian Schatz wrote in a joint statement on Thursday. “Together, the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program and our Inflation Reduction Act’s clean energy tax credits have cleared pathways and removed significant barriers for Tribes to finance and build their own resilient energy infrastructure.”
The American Public Power Association is also sounding the alarm. John Godfrey, the group’s senior government relations director, told me that in addition to wind and solar, municipal utilities and rural electric co-ops are also considering nuclear and hydropower projects. For example, Energy Northwest, a consortium of 29 public utilities in Washington State, has plans to retrofit the Columbia Generating Station nuclear plant to increase its power output. It’s also in early stages to deploy four small, modular nuclear reactors. As my colleague Matthew Zeitlin wrote a few days ago, the governor of New York has also tasked the New York Power Authority with developing a new nuclear plant in the state.
Nuclear and hydropower “are technologies where often there is not a U.S. source, but there is a good trading partner source — Canada, Germany, Japan,” Godfrey said. By tightening the domestic sourcing requirements for direct pay, the bill would “hinder the very technologies that there’s generally a bipartisan consensus we need to be developing.”
Public utilities and electric co-ops, which serve close to 30% of electric customers in the U.S., are also unfairly singled out by the provision, he said. “If my public power utility wants to develop a project and they need a Canadian turbine, they can’t get any credit. But if a taxable corporation down the street develops exactly the same project, they can.”
“If the purpose is to encourage hydropower, that’s not a good use of resources,” he said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect that the domestic sourcing requirements in the IRA applied to projects larger than 1 megawatt.
Senate Republicans tucked a carveout into their reconciliation bill that would allow at least one lucky renewable energy project to qualify for a major Inflation Reduction Act tax credit even after the law is all but repealed.
The only problem is, it’s near impossible to be sure right now who may actually benefit from this giveaway — and the mystery is driving me up the wall. I feel like Charlie Day in that episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, stringing documents together and ranting like a lunatic.
The Senate bill would phase out the tech-neutral production tax credit starting next year and completely eliminate it by the start of 2028. For the past week and a half, I have been trying to solve the riddle of an exemption tucked into the language that would allow a wind or solar facility that is “part of a single project” to continue to take advantage of the tech-neutral production tax credit as it exists today, which means it would not begin to phase out until 2034.
To qualify for the exemption a project must, according to the Senate text, meet two conditions: It must produce more than 1 gigawatt of electricity, and be sited on federal lands where a “right-of-way grant or lease” had been given by the Bureau of Land Managementbefore June 16, which is the date the text was released.
Only a handful of projects in the U.S. could possibly fit that criteria. But every time I think I’ve identified one that will actually qualify, I learn a new fact that, to me, takes it out of the running.
Here’s why my head hurts so much: A renewables facility that would benefit from this language needs to be sited at least partially on federal lands. But because Trump isn’t issuing new right-of-way approvals or leases to most renewables projects right now, it likely had to get its right-of-way or its lease before he entered office. (The June 16 language feels like a bit of a red herring. Nothing that fits the other definitions has received these documents since the start of Trump 2.0.)
Then there’s another factor: The only projects that would benefit from this language are ones that haven't started construction yet. Even if a project doesn’t have all of its permits for federal land use, its developer can build stuff like roads on any connected private lands and technically meet the deadline to start construction laid out in the new legislation. The construction start date is what counts — it doesn’t matter whether a project is placed in service and provides power to the grid years later, as long as it began construction before that deadline.
Taken together, all this means that a project that would benefit from this language probably has to be sited on federal lands and hold permits already … but for some reason can’t start construction to qualify for the program.
When I first started hunting for an answer, many people — including renewables advocates, anti-wind activists, and even some Senate staff in conversations with me — speculated that the language was a giveaway to two wind projects under construction in Wyoming, Chokecherry and Sierra Madre, which together make up what would likely be the largest wind farm in the U.S. if completed. These two projects are largely sited on federal lands and received all their approvals before Trump entered office.
I understand why people are pointing at Chokecherry and Sierra Madre. They are not expected to be online before 2029, and the House version of the bill would have locked them out of the production tax credit because it added a requirement that projects be “placed in service” — i.e. actively providing power to the grid — by around that same period. Any slippage in construction might have really hurt their finances. They’re also backed by a powerful billionaire, GOP donor and live entertainment power-broker Phil Anschutz, a man who made his initial fortune partially from fossil fuels.
Except … my colleagues and I are still not convinced. That’s because it is not clear that these two projects are at any actual risk of losing the production tax credit. They have been actively under construction for a long time, and the Senate bill killed the House’s “placed in service” requirement.
Another project floated is the Lava Ridge wind farm in Idaho, which was fully permitted under Biden, is largely sited on federal lands, and would produce more power than necessary to qualify for the exception. Hypothetically, this project would be a great candidate for being a beneficiary of the bill because Trump banned work on the project via executive order amid opposition from Idaho politicians, making a carveout to get more time a worthwhile endeavor.
Except … Senate Finance Chair Mike Crapo, the lead author of the pertinent section of the Senate reconciliation bill, was one of those Idaho politicians who pushed Trump to kill Lava Ridge. Why would he give a tax break to a project he wanted dead?
Then there was my personal best guess for the beneficiary: Esmeralda 7, an expansive set of proposed solar farms in the Nevada desert that, as proposed, would produce more than 5 gigawatts of power and is largely sited on federal land. Construction can’t begin until Esmeralda 7 gets its federal approvals, and the Trump administration was expected to complete that work by mid-summer.
Except … I reported last week that the permitting process for Esmeralda 7 is now indefinitely stalled. The project is at best still months away from getting its right-of-way approvals from the Trump administration, which recently pushed back timelines for finishing reviews of other large Nevada solar projects, too.
Ultimately, it will be difficult to glean who the lobbyist giveaway here is for unless the legislators who wrote it disclose their intentions. I reached out to the communications director for Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee to try and find out, but so far I’ve gotten crickets.
It may be that this language is revised and that future changes lay out the true beneficiary. Sometimes lawmakers will put the wrong date or word into a bill and they’ll edit it on the floor before a vote, chalking it up to a drafting error.
If senators decide to add back the “placed in service” requirement to capitulate to the House, this would easily be the Chokecherry-Sierra Madre giveaway. If Republicans were to shift forward the deadline for getting a right-of-way, Esmeralda 7 would qualify. Or maybe they could change some secret third thing and a different project I hadn’t considered will be revealed as the mastermind in the shadows.
Until then, I’ll be in my basement poring over more maps and going slowly insane.
Additional reporting was provided by Emily Pontecorvo.