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These are the 10 most important clean energy transition projects struggling to get off the ground
The senator spoke at a Heatmap event in Washington, D.C. last week about the state of U.S. manufacturing.
On Beijing’s coal dip, Iran’s environmental ‘catastrophe,’ and Thanksgiving carbon footprint
Congress is motivated to pass a bipartisan deal, but Democrats are demanding limits on executive power.
On Ex-Im’s energy spree, a new American coal plant, and Oregon abundance
Current conditions: Thunderstorms are rolling through eastern Texas today into Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi • More than 11,000 people in seven Malaysian states say they’re affected by heavy flooding • America’s two most populous overseas territories at opposite sides of the planet are experiencing diverging rip tides, with a dangerously powerful undertow in Guam but a weak pull this week in Puerto Rico.
The conference logo on a building. Wagner Meier/Getty Images
The final resolution that concluded the United Nations climate summit in Brazil made no mention of fossil fuels, in what The New York Times called “a victory for oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia.” But the so-called COP30 confab in the northeastern Amazonian city of Belém made some notable progress. This was the first conference to seriously broach the effects of mining the metals needed for the energy transition, as I wrote here last week. The event had other firsts, as the Financial Times noted: It was the first completely spurned by the U.S. administration, “the first since the world hit 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming for an entire calendar year,” and — it turned out — “the first with a venue plagued by extreme heat, flooding — even a fire that brought the talks to a standstill for much of their second-last day.” But, FT columnist Pilita Clark continued, Brazil’s turn at the yearly summit “still managed something these huge annual gatherings should have done years ago: a shift away from showy pledges to tackling the real world complexities of cutting carbon emissions.”
The COP30 statement “does not spell out the implications or required response as bluntly as many want to see,” Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorvo wrote, “It does, however, introduce an important new concept that could become a key part of the negotiations in the future. For the first time, the text references a resolve to ‘limit both the magnitude and duration of any temperature overshoot.’ This not only acknowledges that it’s possible to bring temperatures back down after warming surpasses 1.5 degrees, but that the level at which temperatures peak, and the length of time we remain at that peak before the world begins to cool, are just as important. The statement implies the need for a much larger conversation about carbon removal that has been nearly absent from the annual COPs, but which scientists say that countries must have if they are serious about the Paris Agreement goals.”
The U.S. Export-Import Bank plans to invest $100 billion in overseas energy projects to promote President Donald Trump’s global energy dominance. The first tranche of funding will go to projects in Egypt, Pakistan, and Europe. In his first interview since taking office in September, the federal lender’s newly-appointed chair, John Jovanovic, told the FT the administration was focusing the bank on “efforts to secure U.S. and allied supply chains for critical minerals, nuclear energy, and liquified natural gas to counter western reliance on China and Russia.” In short, Jovanovic said, the Ex-Im Bank is “back in a big way, and it’s open for business.”
Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon last week announced $4 million in state matching funds to study building a second coal-fired unit at the Dry Fork Station power plant in Gillette. The move, Cowboy State Daily reported, “could be the first step toward building a new coal-fired power plant” in the sparsely populated state’s third-largest city. “This is clear proof that coal is not dead and a reminder that Wyoming’s strength has always come from our ability to innovate without abandoning our values,” Gordon, a Republican, said in a statement. If built, the plant would be the first new coal-fired unit to open in the U.S. since 2013.
The Trump administration is trying to keep existing coal plants open. But it’s running into the problem that their equipment keeps breaking down, as Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote. The trend toward coal isn’t unique to Trump’s America. Coal demand is rising globally.
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Oregon Governor Tina Kotek ordered state agencies last week to speed up the government’s performance on permitting, energy efficiency, electrification, and low-carbon fuel. In a speech, the Democrat said her administration would pursue the cheapest pathway to the state’s 2040 target of decarbonizing electricity, E&E News reported. “We’re talking about what we really need to meet our [climate] goals in an affordable way… where we’re not getting help from the federal government,” Kotek said Wednesday at a press conference.
Democratic states are largely in a moment of flux on climate policy. California eased permitting restrictions and passed a series of bills on energy and emissions, as Emily laid out at the time. As I reported here last week, Pennsylvania took the opposite approach and withdrew from the multi-state cap-and-trade market under pressure to contain costs. New York, meanwhile, has required a federal judge to intervene to force its government to enforce climate regulations. It's all part of the emerging tension between Democrats' affordability campaigns and the party's desire to cut planet-heating pollution, as Heatmap's Robinson Meyer wrote.
Regular readers of this newsletter scarcely need reminding of two basic realities about the American oil and gas industry right now: Trump is opening virtually everywhere he can to production, but drilling has largely remained flat. But the market is looking good to the British developer Harbour Energy. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Linda Cook, the company’s chief executive, said Harbour Energy is exploring a potential acquisition or merger with rivals in the U.S. offshore and onshore drilling business as a way to enter “the biggest market in the world” where the London-headquartered firm isn’t already present. In a sign of confidence in Trump’s as-yet-unrealized promise to “drill, baby, drill,” Harbour Energy has widened its scope from its past inquiries into only U.S. offshore assets to also look at onshore drilling.
Beyond COP30, Brazil has at least one more first. The country’s National Nuclear Energy Commission approved construction of Latin America’s first nuclear waste repository, set to start next year, World Nuclear News reported. While Brazil is one of the only nations in the region with atomic energy, the country has just two reactors. Despite approaching nuclear power more hesitantly than neighboring Argentina, breaking ground on the first storage site would signal a significant step forward for the nascent industry in South America.
Here’s what stood out to former agency staffers.
The Department of Energy unveiled a long-awaited internal reorganization of the agency on Thursday, implementing sweeping changes that Secretary of Energy Chris Wright pitched as “aligning its operations to restore commonsense to energy policy, lower costs for American families and businesses.”
The two-paragraph press release, which linked to a PDF of the new organizational chart, offered little insight into what the changes mean. Indeed, two sources familiar with the rollout told me the agency hadn’t even held a town hall to explain the overhaul to staffers until sometime Friday. (Both sources spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisals.)
After conversations with multiple former agency staffers, including a senior political appointee who helped lead the Biden-era reorganization in 2022, here’s what stood out to me:
The spring 2022 overhaul Jennifer Granholm, former President Joe Biden’s secretary of energy, oversaw came with a detailed legal memo and extensive explanations about what the changes would mean.
“Overall, this seems sloppy,” the former senior staffer who led that process told me this morning. “If you’re trying to carry out a very coherent energy dominance strategy, you’d at least explain which boxes are moving where and what’s sitting under those boxes.”
Announcing the changes with so little detail, the former official said, “seems like a fundamental lack of leadership.”
“This, to me, just seems reckless,” the appointee continued. “People who are sitting within these offices don’t know where they’re going to work virtually on Monday.”
That, of course, may change by the end of today once the Energy Department holds its town hall meeting.
It’s unusual for an office at the agency to report directly to the secretary. Those that do typically straddle multiple types of responsibilities within the agency. For example, the Office of Technology Transitions reported directly to Granholm under the Biden administration because its purview fell under both research and deployment. The Office of Policy functions similarly. But the newly-created Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation absorbed not only various mining-related sections of the agency, but also the now-defunct Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. That puts a lot of money and grant-making powers under the new office.
Leading the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation will be Audrey Robertson, who was confirmed last month as the assistant secretary for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. A former investment banker and oil executive, Robertson served on the board of directors of Wright’s former company, the fracking giant Liberty Energy, until earlier this year. Another agency source familiar with the organization said “it makes no sense for this office not to answer to an undersecretary of energy.”
“Audrey is Wright’s person,” the source told me.
That, the other former agency official told me, creates some political liabilities for Wright.
“For departmental oversight reasons, that’s a lot of grant-making money and authorities that typically you’d want to layer under additional oversight before it goes to the secretary,” the ex-official said. “This is the thing that sticks out like a sore thumb.”
All that said about the new Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, no one can blame Wright for wanting to consolidate some of the bureaucracy. One way to read the decision to eliminate certain offices, such as the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains or the Office of State and Community Energy Programs, is that the new administration wanted to undo the changes made under its predecessor in 2022. While manufacturing work included a lot of what the U.S. is doing with batteries, funding for that work fell under the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.
“A lot of the moves that they’re doing to re-consolidate offices aligns with what was technically under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which directed battery work to go through EERE,” one of the sources told me. “So some of this is realignment back to the original congressional direction.”
The stop-gap funding bill that reopened the government after the longest shutdown in history included a measure to prevent any dismissals until January 30.
But it’s unclear whether the agency plans to terminate workers as part of the reorganization starting in February.
In a sign that the Trump administration is taking efforts to commercialize fusion energy technology more seriously, the reorganization gives fusion its own office, moving the work out of the Office of Science.
“Overall this is a win for the private-fusion sector, and further cements a move from a discovery-based research model to milestone-driven, commercialization-focused policy,” Stuart Allen, the chief executive of the investment company FusionX Group, wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “All signs point to a federal strategy increasingly aligned and enmeshed with the rapid advancement of fusion energy.”
Under the new structure, geothermal and fossil fuels will live together under the new Hydrocarbons and Geothermal Energy Office.
There are some obvious synergies. The new generation of geothermal startups racing toward commercialization rely on drilling techniques such as fracking to tap into hot rocks in places that conventional companies couldn’t. Oil and gas companies are excited about the industry; Sage Geosystems, one of the big players, is led by the former head of Shell’s fracking division. And notably, most of the big companies, including Sage, Fervo Energy, and XGS Energy (whom I have written about twice recently in these pages) are all headquartered in Big Oil’s capital of Houston, Texas.
Nuclear power has long had its own office at the Energy Department, and that won’t change. But you’d think that the other source of clean baseload power that the Trump administration has anointed as one of its preferred generating sources might get slotted in with geothermal. Instead, however, hydropower is in Robertson’s mega-office.
Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the Energy Department’s work that deals with the nation’s nuclear arsenal was largely left untouched by the changes. Perhaps the agency had enough drama from the Department of Government Efficiency’s dismissals of critical workers in the early days of the administration, which led to an embarrassing effort to reverse the firings.
As was widely expected, the reorg killed the Biden-era Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, which the new administration had already gutted. What becomes of key programs that office managed is still a mystery. Chief among them: the hydrogen hubs.
The Energy Department yanked funding for the two regional hubs on the West Coast last month, as Heatmap’s Emily Pontecorovo reported at the time. A leaked list that the administration has yet to confirm as real proposed defunding all seven of the hubs. It’s unclear whether that may happen. If it doesn’t, it’s unclear where those billions of dollars may go. The most obvious place is under Robertson’s portfolio, ballooning the budget under her control by billions.
When Wright announced the first totally new loan issued under the agency’s in-house lender earlier this week, he trumpeted his new approach the Loan Programs Office. He wanted to refashion the entity with its lending authority of nearly $400 billion as a source of funding primarily for the nuclear industry. The first big loan issued Tuesday afternoon went to utility giant Constellation to finance the restart of the functional reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear station. But at a press conference last month, Wright hinted at the new branding, as Emily called in this piece. It’s now the Office of Energy Dominance Financing.
The new office isn’t just the LPO, however. The $2.5 billion Transmission Facility Financing Program will also fall under the new so-called EDF — an acronym it will aptly share with France’s biggest utility, which came under state control recently as part of Paris’ efforts to refurbish and expand the country’s vast nuclear fleet.
I’ll leave it to my source to level a critique at my colleagues in this industry:
“Even in The New York Times today there’s an article that says all these offices are eliminated,” one of the sources told me. “Their names were eliminated, but a lot of the projects for whatever remains that they haven’t terminated are just being reassigned.” The Wall Street Journal had a similar angle.
The actual thing to watch for, the source said, was how job descriptions change.
“What’s going to be more telling is when they have a new, updated mission of the Office of Electricity or a new, updated mission of the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation.”
