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At least one target of Chris Wright’s grant review may run into some sticky statutory issues.
The Department of Energy announced on Thursday that it’s reviewing some 179 awards made by the Biden administration worth $15 billion to ensure they were “consistent with Federal law and this Administration’s policies and priorities.”
But what happens when federal law and Trump’s priorities are at odds?
In the case of at least one awardee, the major U.S. steel producer Cleveland Cliffs, the DOE’s review process may become a mechanism to take funding that is statutorily designated for projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and channel it into long-lived fossil fuel assets.
Lourenco Goncalves, the CEO of Cleveland Cliffs, a major U.S. steel producer, said on an earnings call last week that the company was in the process of renegotiating its $500 million award under the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The DOE program funded 33 projects to decarbonize heavy industry, including cement, steel, aluminum, and glass production, with first-of-its-kind or early-scale commercial technologies.
Cleveland Cliffs was originally going to use the money to replace its coal-fired blast furnace at a steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, with a new unit that ran on a mix of hydrogen and natural gas as well as new electric furnaces. Now, the company is working with the Department of Energy to “explore changes in scope to better align with the administration’s energy priorities,” Goncalves told investors. The project would no longer assume the use of hydrogen and “would instead rely on readily available and more economical fossil fuels.”
The CEO later clarified that the company planned to “reline” its blast furnace at Middletown, extending its life, “now that the project is changing scope.”
But the Inflation Reduction Act, which created the Industrial Demonstrations Program, says the funds must be used for “the purchase and installation, or implementation, of advanced industrial technology,” which it defines as tech “designed to accelerate greenhouse gas emissions reduction progress to net-zero.”
“I don’t know at this point what Cleveland Cliffs can confidently say they’re going to do to substantially reduce greenhouse gasses and also deliver gains in public health and jobs to local communities, which is a prerequisite for IDP grant money,” Yong Kwon, a senior advisor for the Sierra Club’s Industrial Transformation Campaign, told me.
The memo announcing the Department of Energy’s review says that it has already reached some “concerning” findings, though it does not describe what was concerning or provide any further detail about the awards under review.
Compared to his peers at other agencies, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has been noticeably quiet about the Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to slash funding across the Department of Energy. But in March, Axios obtained documents that said more than 60% of grants awarded under the Industrial Demonstrations Program were being targeted. The following month, CNN reported that Cleveland Cliffs’ Middletown project was on the list slated for termination, noting that it would have secured 2,500 jobs and created more than 100 new, permanent jobs in JD Vance’s hometown.
At the time, Energy Department spokesperson Ben Dietderich told CNN that “no final decisions have been made” about the funding and that “multiple plans are still being considered.” Now it appears the Department may be negotiating with Cleveland Cliffs to develop a cheaper and more politically palatable project.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have also introduced a bill that would rescind any money from the Industrial Demonstrations Program that isn’t obligated, meaning that if the Department of Energy can find a way to legally terminate its contracts with companies, Congress may claw back the money.
The Industrial Demonstrations Program was the Biden administration’s “missing middle” grant program, designed to support projects that were past the early experimental stage, in which case they were no longer candidates for funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency, but were also not ready for mass deployment, like those supported by the Loan Programs Office. In the case of Cleveland Cliffs, the funding was also aimed at making the U.S. a leader in the future of steelmaking, retaining thousands of jobs, saving the company money, and enabling it to command a higher price for its products.
“If you’re going to maintain blast furnaces, it means you have one foot in a technology that is now quickly becoming outdated that the rest of the global steel industry is transitioning away from,” Kwon told me.
David Super, an expert in administrative law at Georgetown University, told me in an email that if the Department of Energy provides and Cleveland Cliffs accepts funding that does not comply with statute, “the Department officials involved could be in violation of the Antideficiency Act and Cleveland Cliffs could be required to return the money, a modified contract notwithstanding.” The Antideficiency Act prohibits federal employees from obligating funds for projects that are not authorized by law.
Super added that the law also specifies that the money be awarded “on a competitive basis.” As Cleveland Cliffs won the competition with its hydrogen project, allowing it to use the money for a different project at the company’s plant “would thus violate the requirement of competitive awards and would allow the unsuccessful bidders to challenge this funding award.”
Neither Cleveland Cliffs nor the Department of Energy responded to a request for comment.
Leaks to the press have signaled that the Department of Energy may be taking a similar approach with the hydrogen hubs, potentially terminating contracts to develop renewable energy-based projects — all of which are in blue states — while allowing natural gas-based projects in red states to continue.
It is still not clear how the agency will handle its $3.5 billion direct air capture hubs, which news outlets have reported may also be under threat. On Friday, however, the oil and gas company Occidental, which was awarded a contract to develop a DAC hub in Texas, announced that the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is considering investing up to $500 million in the project as part of a new joint-venture agreement. The press release notes that the agreement was signed during President Trump’s visit to the United Arab Emirates.
Last week, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said during a confirmation hearing for Kyle Haustveit, the nominee to head the Office of Fossil Energy, that two carbon capture projects in her state were “in limbo” due to the agency’s spending review. The same day, in another hearing, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida accused Wright of having frozen $67 billion worth of funds and asked him to commit to releasing it.
Wright denied this. “We’re not withholding any funds and we’ve paid every invoice we’ve had for work done and funds that are due,” he replied. But he went on to clarify that the agency is “engaging with” recipients “to make sure American taxpayer monies are being spent in thoughtful, reasonable ways.”
According to efficiency department data, the DOE has “terminated” 39 contracts worth $60 million and five grants worth $3.4 million. The contracts include news subscriptions, various technical support services, and a $22 million contract with consulting firm McKinsey for “rapid response deliverables” for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the department that runs the Industrial Demonstrations Program. The grants include three Advanced Research Projects Agency awards to explore using geologic stores of hydrogen, and another to reduce methane emissions from natural gas flares.
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On betrayed regulatory promises, copper ‘anxiety,’ and Mercedes’ stalled EV plans
Current conditions: Typhoon Wipha is barrelling through southern China, making its way across the mainland after pummeling Hong Kong with heavy rain • More than 60 million Americans are facing heat alerts as temperatures surge • The unusually warm 21-degree Fahrenheit temperature recorded at Summit Station in Greenland is just a few degrees off a record high.
EPA Administrator Lee ZeldinKevin Lamarque-Pool/Getty Images
The Environmental Protection Agency announced plans on Friday afternoon to shut down its research arm and fire hundreds of biologists, chemists, toxicologists, and other scientists whose work helps determine safe pollution levels for regulations. The announcement comes after months of denials from EPA administrator Lee Zeldin that he planned to close the division in question, the Office of Research and Development, which studies the threat from climate change, toxic chemicals, and air and water pollution on human health, and funds university research programs.
The closure comes as part of deep job cuts at the agency. In a statement on Friday, Zeldin said the more than 500 layoffs — which, combined with voluntary buyouts, will slash the EPA’s workforce by nearly one-quarter compared to January’s numbers — would save taxpayers nearly $750 million. The nation’s biggest chemical manufacturers’ lobby agreed, arguing to NPR that the cuts would “ensure American taxpayer dollars are being used efficiently and effectively.” But environmentalists warned that the cuts would “not only cripple EPA’s ability to do its own research, but also to apply the research of other scientists.”
Shares in non-Chinese producers of graphite surged on Friday after the Trump administration slapped new anti-dumping duties of 93.5% on imports of the key mineral for batteries, the Financial Times reported. Combined with existing tariffs on Chinese materials, the new trade levies total more than 160%, according to the consultancy Benchmark Minerals. In response, the stock price for Australia-listed Syrah Resources, the world’s largest non-Chinese graphite miner and the developer behind a key Inflation Reduction Act-funded project in Louisiana, shot up 22%. Canada’s Nouveau Monde Graphite spiked 26%. The dual-listed Australian-U.S. producer Novonix surged 15%.
Not all of President Donald Trump’s mineral tariffs are causing excitement for U.S. allies. Earlier this month, the White House announced 50% tariffs on copper to begin in August, but it has yet to clarify whether those tariffs will apply to refined metal, semi-refined products, or copper ore. The uncertainty is causing “anxiety,” Máximo Pacheco, the chairman of Chile’s state-owned copper miner, told the FT. As Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin wrote when the tariffs were first announced, they have the potential to “provide renewed impetus to expand copper mining in the United States. But tariffs can happen in a matter of months. A copper mine takes years to open — and that’s if investors decide to put the money toward the project in the first place.”
Regulators in Virginia last week ordered electricity and natural gas provider Dominion to lay out a clearer blueprint for meeting the state’s legally-enshrined carbon-free electricity targets. But the State Corporation Commission still accepted the monopoly utility’s plans to build out more fossil fuel generation, Canary Media reported.
The Virginia Clean Economy Act, passed in 2020, requires Dominion to generate 100% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2045. The accepted plan runs up to 2039, leaving just six years to sort out the details of decarbonization. The regulators cautioned that “acceptance does not express approval.” While the statement stopped short of calling into question a proposed 944-megawatt gas complex just south of Richmond, Virginia’s capital, the commission said it would debate plans for another roughly 5 gigawatts of gas-burning power plants before approving construction..
British energy giant BP is selling off its U.S. onshore wind business as the Trump administration appears ready to smother the industry. On Friday, New York-based developer LS Power said it agreed to buy BP’s share of 10 wind projects totaling 1,700 megawatts of capacity. As part of the deal, LS Power plans to fold the wind projects into its renewable energy subsidiary, Clearlight Energy, increasing its fleet to 4,300 megawatts.
BP’s exit comes as the Trump administration has vowed to crack down on the expansion of wind and solar power in the U.S. Trump has long personally opposed wind energy, dating back to his unsuccessful fight against turbines erected near his golf course in Scotland before entering politics. Last week, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reported on a memo from the Department of the Interior calling for political reviews of essentially all solar and wind developments in the U.S. This would at minimum stretch out the already challenging development timeline for projects, a problem especially as developers rush to qualify for federal tax credits.
Mercedes-Benz is pumping the brakes on U.S. production of its EQ line of electric vehicles as the Trump administration winds down federal tax credits to support purchases of battery-powered cars. The German automaker told InsideEVs that, by the start of September, it planned to temporarily pause assembly lines of all variants of its EQE and EQS sedans and SUVs that are either located in the U.S. or producing vehicles bound for the American market. The manufacturer is no longer taking orders from dealers for the cars.
Reviewers had criticized the EQ models for lacking the quality and sophistication of similar gas-powered lines of Mercedes vehicles. Even before Republicans in Congress rolled back the federal government’s landmark $7,500 tax credit for EVs, Mercedes faced trouble finding buyers. Sales of the EQS sedan and EQS SUV were down 52% in the U.S. in 2024 compared to the previous year. China’s biggest electric automakers, meanwhile, are racing to build factories in Brazil, the largest car market in South America.
Like tiny winged Magellans measuring barely an inch in size, the Bogong moth of Australia regularly travels more than 600 miles using celestial navigation, according to a new study in Nature. “The moths really are using a view of the night sky to guide their movements,” a researcher told Euronews.
From the Inflation Reduction Act to the Trump mega-law, here are 20 years of changes in one easy-to-read cheat sheet.
The landmark Republican reconciliation bill, which President Trump signed on July 4, has shattered the tax credits that served as the centerpiece of the country’s clean energy and climate policy.
Starting as soon as October, the law — which Trump has dubbed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — will cut off incentives for Americans to install solar panels, purchase electric vehicles, or make energy efficiency improvements to their homes. It’s projected to raise household energy costs while increasing America’s carbon emissions by 190 million metric tons a year by 2030, according to the REPEAT Project at Princeton University.
The loss of these incentives will in part offset the continuation of tax cuts that largely benefit wealthy Americans. But the law as a whole won’t come close to paying for those cuts in their entirety. The legislation is expected to swell federal deficits by nearly $3.8 trillion over the next 10 years, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank. This explosive deficit expansion could make it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, possibly further constraining energy development.
President Trump has described the law as ending Democrats’ “green new scam,” and conservative lawmakers have celebrated the termination of Biden-era energy programs. The law is particularly devastating for programs encouraging electric vehicle sales, as well as wind and solar energy deployment.
But the act is more complicated than a simple repeal of Democrats’ 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. In one case, Trump’s big law ends a federal energy incentive that has been in place, in some form, since the 1990s. In others, Republicans have tied up existing energy incentives with new restrictions, regulations, and red tape.
Some parts of the IRA have even remained intact. GOP lawmakers opted to preserve Biden’s big expansion of incentives to support nuclear energy and advanced geothermal development. That said, the Trump administration could still gut these tax credits by making them effectively unusable through executive action.
It can be confusing to keep the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s many changes to federal energy law in your head — even for experts. That’s why Heatmap News is excited to publish this new reference “cheat sheet”on the past, present, and future of federal energy tax credits, compiled by an all-star collection of analysts and researchers.
The summary takes each clean energy-related provision in the U.S. tax code and summarizes how (and whether) it existed in the 2000s and 2010s, how the Inflation Reduction Act changed it, and how the new OBBBA will change it again. It was compiled by Shane Londagin, a policy advisor at the think tank Third Way; Luke Bassett, a former Biden administration official and Senate Energy committee staffer; Avi Zevin, a former Biden official and a partner at the energy law firm Roselle LLP; and researchers at the REPEAT Project, an energy analysis group at Princeton University. (Note that I co-host the podcast Shift Key with Jesse Jenkins, who leads the REPEAT Project.)
You can find the full summary below.
On presidential proclamations, Pentagon pollution, and cancelled transmission
Current conditions: Over 1,000 people have evacuated the region of Seosan in South Korea following its heaviest rainfall since 1904 • Forecasts now point toward the “surprising return” of La Niña this fall • More than 30 million people from Louisiana through the Appalachians are at risk of flash flooding this weekend due to an incoming tropical rainstorm.
The Hugh L. Spurlock Generating Station in Maysville, Kentucky.Jeff Swensen/Getty Images
President Trump on Thursday signed four proclamations allowing certain highly polluting industries to bypass regulations established by the Biden administration. In addition to chemical manufacturers that help produce semiconductors and medical device sterilizers, the proclamations singled out coal-fired power plants and taconite iron ore processing facilities for two years of exemptions. Taconite is a low-grade iron ore primarily mined in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and northern Minnesota, which is then processed for use in the production of iron and steel. Trump justified the move by arguing that compliance with the current emissions rule for coal-fired power plants raises the “unacceptable risk” of shutdowns, “eliminating thousands of jobs, placing our electrical grid at risk, and threatening broader, harmful economic and energy security effects,” while the iron processing emissions rule “risks forcing shutdowns, reducing domestic production, and undermining the nation’s ability to supply steel for defense, energy, and critical manufacturing.”
The proclamations allow industries to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency standards that predate former President Joe Biden’s tenure. Trump justified the pause by claiming the former administration had mandated compliance with “standards that rely on emissions-control technologies that have not been demonstrated to work.” Researchers have previously found that air pollutants related to coal power plants cause nearly 3,000 attributable deaths per year. Taconite iron ore processing facilities produce harmful acid gases, including hydrogen chloride and hydrogen fluoride, as well as mercury, which have been linked to numerous adverse health effects.
Separately, the House passed Trump’s $9 billion rescissions package late last night, which includes cuts to international climate, energy, and environmental programs like the Clean Technology Fund. Republicans Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania and Mike Turner of Ohio joined Democrats in objecting to the bill. Trump is expected to sign the package Friday. An additional rescissions package is expected “soon.”
The Pentagon’s 2026 budget will enable the Department of Defense’s planet-warming emissions to grow by an additional 26 megatons, or about the equivalent of 68 gas power plants, a new analysis by the Climate and Community Institute found. The U.S. military was already the single largest institutional polluter in the world due to its “vast global operations — from jet fuel consumption and overseas deployments to domestic base maintenance,” as well as its manufacturing of weapons and vehicles, the think tank notes. With the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the Pentagon’s budget will exceed $1 trillion in 2026, representing a 17% increase over 2024. Its emissions, in turn, could grow to the point that if the DOD were its own country, it’d be the 38th largest polluter in the world, producing more CO2 emissions than the Netherlands, Bangladesh, or Venezuela. But “the Pentagon’s true climate impact will almost certainly be worse” than what the researchers found, The Guardian notes, “as the calculation does not include emissions generated from future supplemental funding such as the billions of dollars appropriated separately for military equipment for Israel and Ukraine in recent years.”
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New York’s Public Service Commission decided Thursday against moving forward with a major transmission project that would have had the capacity to deliver at least 4,770 megawatts of offshore wind power to New York City by the early 2030s. The commissioners said they were unable to justify “charging ratepayers for the multibillion-dollar project when feds are stymying” offshore wind, New York Focus’ Colin Kinniburgh reported on Bluesky. “We will continue to press forward regarding infrastructure needs for offshore wind in the future once the federal government resumes leasing and permitting for wind energy generation projects,” PSC chair Rory Christian said.
The canceled Public Policy Transmission Need determination was not specific to a particular offshore wind project, but rather was intended to match New York’s general offshore wind ambitions when it was approved in 2023. But as Heatmap has previously reported, Trump’s crusade against offshore wind has been a “worst case scenario” for the industry since day one, and, per ABC News 10, effectively “eliminates any reason for building new power lines in the first place.”
Microsoft has inked a deal to purchase 4.9 million metric tons of durable carbon dioxide removal from Vaulted Deep, a waste management startup, for an undisclosed amount. The companies boasted that the deal, which runs through 2038, represents “the second-largest carbon removal deal to date.” Vaulted Deep, an Xprize Carbon runner-up, diverts organic waste from landfills and incinerators by injecting it into wells thousands of feet underground using fracking technologies, which it says ensures over 1,000 years of durability, TechCrunch reports. Since Vaulted’s launch in the summer of 2023, the Houston-based company has removed 18,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide. Microsoft, meanwhile, has slipped behind its 2020 goal to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it generates by the end of the decade due to its rush to build out data centers.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s reorganization and downsizing are set to continue, with the agency offering another round of buyouts and early retirements to staffers in offices it aims to restructure, Politico reports. Among the affected offices are the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, which the EPA said it seeks to tweak to “better address pollution problems that impact American communities by re-aligning enforcement with the law to deliver economic prosperity and ensure compliance with agency regulations,” as well as the Office of Land and Emergency Management, which works on Superfund and disaster response issues. The Office of Research and Development, the Office of Mission Support, and the Office of the Chief Financial Officer are also affected.
Separately, in a preliminary decision earlier this week, the agency moved to block the state of Colorado from closing its six remaining coal-fired power plants by 2031. Colorado was attempting to codify the retirement dates in its Regional Haze Plan, which is typically used to protect the air quality of federal wilderness and national parks; however, the EPA rejected the proposal, according to CPR News. “We believe that the Clean Air Act does not give anybody the authority to shut down coal generation plants against the owner’s will,” Cyrus Western, the administrator of EPA Region 8, said. Jeremy Nichols, a senior advocate for the Center of Biological Diversity’s environmental health program, claimed the EPA’s move shows the limits of what climate-conscious states can do on their own. “We may have state rules, but they won't be federally approved,” Nichols told CPR.
“There are so many developers and so many projects in so many places of the world that there are examples where either something goes wrong with a project or a developer doesn’t follow best practices. I think those have a lot more staying power in the public perception of renewable energy than the many successful projects that go without a hiccup and don’t bother people.” —Heatmap Pro’s Charlie Clynes, in conversation with Jael Holzman about his new project tracking all of the nation’s county-level restrictions on renewable energy.