Sign In or Create an Account.

By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy

Podcast

The Early Lessons of Trump’s ‘Energy Dominance’

Rob and Jesse sort through their feelings after Trump's second first month in office.

The White House.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Congress is still debating the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act, but the Trump administration has already torn up energy and climate policies across the federal government. It’s time to step back and try to take stock. How much damage has the Trump administration already done to decarbonization? What’s most worrying? What was going to happen anyway? And what might still be saved?

On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse go agency by agency to understand the most important changes and try to understand the deeper agenda — including potential points of incoherence or disagreement. Shift Key is hosted by Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University, and Robinson Meyer, Heatmap’s executive editor.

Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, or wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.

Here is an excerpt from our conversation:

Robinson Meyer: I think one thing that is also, when you zoom out, is that this is the kind of broader incoherence of their agenda, right? So the U.S. is scheduled to gain a massive addition of new liquefied natural gas export terminals at the end of the Trump term — in the last two years of the Trump term. The Trump administration is quite keen to further expand that expansion and approve another set of terminals that would come on in the late 2020s and early 2030s.

I want to observe a few things about that. I think one thing is that the Trump administration is, to quote a think tank analyst I was talking to recently, is pattern-matching to the late 2010s experience. The U.S. added LNG export capacity during the first Trump administration and gas prices didn’t go up because natural gas production in the U.S. basically scaled with export capacity.

We are going to significantly increase that again. I think we’re basically going to double LNG capacity toward the end of the Trump term. And they are basically assuming that the U.S. will just continue to scale gas extraction capacity at the same time that, presumably, they’re going to expand the power grid’s reliance on natural gas with their power policies. They’re really setting up an environment to be surprised by a natural gas price spike if their supposition is wrong, that the U.S. can’t just expand gas capacity in line with its export capacity.

Jesse Jenkins: Or even if it can expand it, it seems like the market needs higher prices to support that expansion. So maybe we can add enough supply to supply new LNG terminals, but we’ll do so at a higher domestic price because that’s what’s needed to get this production onto the market. Otherwise, it would already be there.

Meyer: And also, globally, natural gas prices are much higher than they are in the U.S. That’s one reason U.S. electricity prices are so cheap. If we build so much LNG that we hook our domestic natural gas market into global LNG markets, then like …

Jenkins: Prices become more volatile.

Meyer: Prices become more volatile, exactly.

Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.

You’re out of free articles.

Subscribe today to experience Heatmap’s expert analysis 
of climate change, clean energy, and sustainability.
To continue reading
Create a free account or sign in to unlock more free articles.
or
Please enter an email address
By continuing, you agree to the Terms of Service and acknowledge our Privacy Policy
Climate Tech

Crusoe Is Pushing the Definition of Climate Tech

A climate tech company powered by natural gas has always been an odd concept. Now as it moves into developing data centers, it insists it’s remaining true to its roots.

Trump and technology.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Crusoe Energy has always been a confusing company, whose convoluted green energy credentials raise some eyebrows. It started as a natural gas-powered Bitcoin miner, then became a climate tech unicorn thanks to the fact that its crypto operations utilized waste gas that would have otherwise been flared into the atmosphere. It’s received significant backing from major clean tech investors such as G2 Venture Partners and Lowercarbon Capital. And it touts sustainability as one of its main selling points, describing itself as “on a mission to align the future of computing with the future of the climate,” in part by “harnessing large-scale clean energy.”

But these days, the late-stage startup valued at $2.8 billion makes the majority of its revenue as a modular data center manufacturer and cloud services provider, and is exploring myriad energy solutions — from natural gas to stranded solar and wind assets — beyond its original focus. Earlier this week, it announced that it would acquire more than 4 gigawatts of new natural gas capacity to power its data center buildout. It’s also heavily involved in the Trump-endorsed $500 billion AI push known as the Stargate Project. The company’s Elon Musk-loving CEO Chase Lochmiller told The Information that his team is “pouring concrete at three in the morning” to build out its Stargate Project data centers at “ludicrous speed.”

Keep reading...Show less
Blue
Climate

AM Briefing: The Greenpeace Verdict

On Energy Transfer’s legal win, battery storage, and the Cybertruck

The Greenpeace Verdict Is In
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Current conditions: Red flag warnings are in place for much of Florida • Spain is bracing for extreme rainfall from Storm Martinho, the fourth named storm in less than two weeks • Today marks the vernal equinox, or the first day of spring.

THE TOP FIVE

1. Jury sides with pipeline company in Greenpeace lawsuit

A jury has ordered Greenpeace to pay more than $660 million in damages to one of the country’s largest fossil fuel infrastructure companies after finding the environmental group liable for defamation, conspiracy, and physical damages at the Dakota Access Pipeline. Greenpeace participated in large protests, some violent and disruptive, at the pipeline in 2016, though it has maintained that its involvement was insignificant and came at the request of the local Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The project eventually went ahead and is operational today, but Texas-based Energy Transfer sued the environmental organization, accusing it of inciting the uprising and encouraging violence. “We should all be concerned about the future of the First Amendment, and lawsuits like this aimed at destroying our rights to peaceful protest and free speech,” said Deepa Padmanabha, senior legal counsel for Greenpeace USA. The group said it plans to appeal.

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow
Fusion.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Thea Energy

Thea Energy, one of the newer entrants into the red-hot fusion energy space, raised $20 million last year as investors took a bet on the physics behind the company’s novel approach to creating magnetic fields. Today, in a paper being submitted for peer review, Thea announced that its theoretical science actually works in the real world. The company’s CEO, Brian Berzin, told me that Thea achieved this milestone “quicker and for less capital than we thought,” something that’s rare in an industry long-mocked for perpetually being 30 years away.

Thea is building a stellarator fusion reactor, which typically looks like a twisted version of the more common donut-shaped tokamak. But as Berzin explained to me, Thea’s stellarator is designed to be simpler to manufacture than the industry standard. “We don’t like high tech stuff,” Berzin told me — a statement that sounds equally anathema to industry norms as the idea of a fusion project running ahead of schedule. “We like stuff that can be stamped and forged and have simple manufacturing processes.”

Keep reading...Show less
Yellow