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On the campaign, Biden promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period.” In office, he’s approved drilling leases faster than Donald Trump.
After hemming and hawing for weeks, the Biden administration has approved ConocoPhillips’ proposed Willow oil drilling project in northern Alaska. Once completed, the project will reportedly produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day.
It’s not as bad as it could have been. The lease area is 40 percent smaller than the company originally wanted, with three drilling sites instead of five. ConocoPhillips will also give up 68,000 acres of other leases in the area.
But this is still an enormous betrayal of Biden’s specific campaign promises and his climate goals.
Biden committed to reducing American greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, and part of that plan is a massive expansion of federal land leases for renewable energy projects. That is indeed happening, but as Jenny Rowland-Shea points out at the Center for American Progress, this one single project more than offsets all the climate benefits from those renewable leases, by a lot. If operated for 30 years as planned, burning the 600 million barrels of oil Willow is estimated to contain will create more than 260 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, or roughly what Spain produces in a year. As she writes, “allowing the Willow project to proceed would result in double the carbon pollution that all renewable progress on public lands and waters would save by 2030.”
The Willow area is also one of the last mostly untouched large pieces of wilderness in the country. Now it’s going to have hundreds of miles of roads, plus pollution-spewing and extremely loud equipment, scattered all over it (not to mention the risk of oil spills). As former Vice President Al Gore told The Guardian, the project “is incompatible with the ambition we need to achieve a net zero future. We don’t need to prop up the fossil fuel industry with new, multi-year projects that are a recipe for climate chaos.”
During the 2020 campaign, Biden specifically promised not to do this, saying “no more drilling on federal lands, period.” In office he’s actually approved drilling leases at a faster pace than Donald Trump.
It’s a grim irony that because northern Alaska is one of the places climate change is hitting worst, with warming roughly triple the world average causing widespread melting of the permafrost, ConocoPhillips is going to have to use “chillers” to keep the roads at the Willow project frozen. Hard to imagine a better metaphor for the damage our addiction to fossil fuels causes — like a junkie getting vein reconstruction surgery so he can shoot up more fentanyl.
It’s not hard to see why the Biden administration would approve this project, along with all the other drilling leases. The whole Alaskan congressional delegation was behind the project on the grounds of jobs and money. Even local native communities were split on the question. Americans are also extremely sensitive about the price of gasoline — particularly thanks to our habit, enabled by federal regulators, of driving colossal gas-guzzling SUVs and trucks —and tend to reflexively blame the president whenever it goes up.
ConocoPhillips has also owned these leases for decades now, and the administration would have been in for a legal battle had it denied the project. Given the right-wing infiltration of the courts, it wouldn’t have been an easy fight. The administration has already lost several similar legal battles, and has faced pressure from Congress to approve more drilling.
But these are pitiful excuses. Even such an enormous project will have little effect on the global price of oil — 180,000 barrels per day is only about 0.2 percent of total oil production. It will also take six years to bring any oil to market. Nobody filling up their Ford F-350 Super Duty will see a difference today and they’ll be hard pressed to notice 10 cents of savings when filling up their 34 gallon tank in the future.
And while it might have been a legal nightmare to block the project, it still would have been worth trying. As a rule, the court system is extremely expensive and takes forever to do anything, and every week of delay would given Biden more time to get his judges appointed, allowed the electric vehicle revolution to progress a bit further, and raised the chance of ConocoPhillips cutting its losses and giving up.
At any rate, this dismal story still underlines the case for transitioning away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible. Even politicians like Biden who seem to understand the climate crisis blanch at the prospect of shutting down carbon drilling while so many people and businesses depend on it. We saw this in Europe as well in the initial stages of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, with Germany scrambling to turn on mothballed coal power plants to keep the lights on (though as I previously wrote, the continent has since stampeded towards renewable energy, in part because even coal is much more expensive than renewables now).
The sooner we can kick the carbon habit, the easier it will be to block drilling projects. Hopefully someday soon they won’t even make economic sense — maybe even before Willow’s 30 years is up.
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The Loan Programs Office is good for more than just nuclear funding.
That China has a whip hand over the rare earths mining and refining industry is one of the few things Washington can agree on.
That’s why Alex Jacquez, who worked on industrial policy for Joe Biden’s National Economic Council, found it “astounding”when he read in the Washington Post this week that the White House was trying to figure out on the fly what to do about China restricting exports of rare earth metals in response to President Trump’s massive tariffs on the country’s imports.
Rare earth metals have a wide variety of applications, including for magnets in medical technology, defense, and energy productssuch as wind turbines and electric motors.
Jacquez told me there has been “years of work, including by the first Trump administration, that has pointed to this exact case as the worst-case scenario that could happen in an escalation with China.” It stands to reason, then, that experienced policymakers in the Trump administration might have been mindful of forestalling this when developing their tariff plan. But apparently not.
“The lines of attack here are numerous,” Jacquez said. “The fact that the National Economic Council and others are apparently just thinking about this for the first time is pretty shocking.”
And that’s not the only thing the Trump administration is doing that could hamper American access to rare earths and critical minerals.
Though China still effectively controls the global pipeline for most critical minerals (a broader category that includes rare earths as well as more commonly known metals and minerals such as lithium and cobalt), the U.S. has been at work for at least the past five years developing its own domestic supply chain. Much of that work has fallen to the Department of Energy, whose Loan Programs Office has funded mining and processing facilities, and whose Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains hasfunded and overseen demonstration projects for rare earths and critical minerals mining and refining.
The LPO is in line for dramatic cuts, as Heatmap has reported. So, too, are other departments working on rare earths, including the Office of Manufacturing and Energy Supply Chains. In its zeal to slash the federal government, the Trump administration may have to start from scratch in its efforts to build up a rare earths supply chain.
The Department of Energy did not reply to a request for comment.
This vulnerability to China has been well known in Washington for years, including by the first Trump administration.
“Our dependence on one country, the People's Republic of China (China), for multiple critical minerals is particularly concerning,” then-President Trump said in a 2020 executive order declaring a “national emergency” to deal with “our Nation's undue reliance on critical minerals.” At around the same time, the Loan Programs Office issued guidance “stating a preference for projects related to critical mineral” for applicants for the office’s funding, noting that “80 percent of its rare earth elements directly from China.” Using the Defense Production Act, the Trump administration also issued a grant to the company operating America's sole rare earth mine, MP Materials, to help fund a processing facility at the site of its California mine.
The Biden administration’s work on rare earths and critical minerals was almost entirely consistent with its predecessor’s, just at a greater scale and more focused on energy. About a month after taking office, President Bidenissued an executive order calling for, among other things, a Defense Department report “identifying risks in the supply chain for critical minerals and other identified strategic materials, including rare earth elements.”
Then as part of the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the Biden administration increased funding for LPO, which supported a number of critical minerals projects. It also funneled more money into MP Materials — including a $35 million contract from the Department of Defense in 2022 for the California project. In 2024, it awarded the company a competitive tax credit worth $58.5 million to help finance construction of its neodymium-iron-boron magnet factory in Texas. That facilitybegan commercial operation earlier this year.
The finished magnets will be bought by General Motors for its electric vehicles. But even operating at full capacity, it won’t be able to do much to replace China’s production. The MP Metals facility is projected to produce 1,000 tons of the magnets per year.China produced 138,000 tons of NdFeB magnets in 2018.
The Trump administration is not averse to direct financial support for mining and minerals projects, but they seem to want to do it a different way. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has proposed using a sovereign wealth fund to invest in critical mineral mines. There is one big problem with that plan, however: the U.S. doesn’t have one (for the moment, at least).
“LPO can invest in mining projects now,” Jacquez told me. “Cutting 60% of their staff and the experts who work on this is not going to give certainty to the business community if they’re looking to invest in a mine that needs some government backstop.”
And while the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act remains very much in doubt, the subsidies it provided for electric vehicles, solar, and wind, along with domestic content requirements have been a major source of demand for critical minerals mining and refining projects in the United States.
“It’s not something we’re going to solve overnight,” Jacquez said. “But in the midst of a maximalist trade with China, it is something we will have to deal with on an overnight basis, unless and until there’s some kind of de-escalation or agreement.”
A conversation with VDE Americas CEO Brian Grenko.
This week’s Q&A is about hail. Last week, we explained how and why hail storm damage in Texas may have helped galvanize opposition to renewable energy there. So I decided to reach out to Brian Grenko, CEO of renewables engineering advisory firm VDE Americas, to talk about how developers can make sure their projects are not only resistant to hail but also prevent that sort of pushback.
The following conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Hiya Brian. So why’d you get into the hail issue?
Obviously solar panels are made with glass that can allow the sunlight to come through. People have to remember that when you install a project, you’re financing it for 35 to 40 years. While the odds of you getting significant hail in California or Arizona are low, it happens a lot throughout the country. And if you think about some of these large projects, they may be in the middle of nowhere, but they are taking hundreds if not thousands of acres of land in some cases. So the chances of them encountering large hail over that lifespan is pretty significant.
We partnered with one of the country’s foremost experts on hail and developed a really interesting technology that can digest radar data and tell folks if they’re developing a project what the [likelihood] will be if there’s significant hail.
Solar panels can withstand one-inch hail – a golfball size – but once you get over two inches, that’s when hail starts breaking solar panels. So it’s important to understand, first and foremost, if you’re developing a project, you need to know the frequency of those events. Once you know that, you need to start thinking about how to design a system to mitigate that risk.
The government agencies that look over land use, how do they handle this particular issue? Are there regulations in place to deal with hail risk?
The regulatory aspects still to consider are about land use. There are authorities with jurisdiction at the federal, state, and local level. Usually, it starts with the local level and with a use permit – a conditional use permit. The developer goes in front of the township or the city or the county, whoever has jurisdiction of wherever the property is going to go. That’s where it gets political.
To answer your question about hail, I don’t know if any of the [authority having jurisdictions] really care about hail. There are folks out there that don’t like solar because it’s an eyesore. I respect that – I don’t agree with that, per se, but I understand and appreciate it. There’s folks with an agenda that just don’t want solar.
So okay, how can developers approach hail risk in a way that makes communities more comfortable?
The bad news is that solar panels use a lot of glass. They take up a lot of land. If you have hail dropping from the sky, that’s a risk.
The good news is that you can design a system to be resilient to that. Even in places like Texas, where you get large hail, preparing can mean the difference between a project that is destroyed and a project that isn’t. We did a case study about a project in the East Texas area called Fighting Jays that had catastrophic damage. We’re very familiar with the area, we work with a lot of clients, and we found three other projects within a five-mile radius that all had minimal damage. That simple decision [to be ready for when storms hit] can make the complete difference.
And more of the week’s big fights around renewable energy.
1. Long Island, New York – We saw the face of the resistance to the war on renewable energy in the Big Apple this week, as protestors rallied in support of offshore wind for a change.
2. Elsewhere on Long Island – The city of Glen Cove is on the verge of being the next New York City-area community with a battery storage ban, discussing this week whether to ban BESS for at least one year amid fire fears.
3. Garrett County, Maryland – Fight readers tell me they’d like to hear a piece of good news for once, so here’s this: A 300-megawatt solar project proposed by REV Solar in rural Maryland appears to be moving forward without a hitch.
4. Stark County, Ohio – The Ohio Public Siting Board rejected Samsung C&T’s Stark Solar project, citing “consistent opposition to the project from each of the local government entities and their impacted constituents.”
5. Ingham County, Michigan – GOP lawmakers in the Michigan State Capitol are advancing legislation to undo the state’s permitting primacy law, which allows developers to evade municipalities that deny projects on unreasonable grounds. It’s unlikely the legislation will become law.
6. Churchill County, Nevada – Commissioners have upheld the special use permit for the Redwood Materials battery storage project we told you about last week.