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The American oil industry wasn’t built for Canadian tariffs.
Since his re-election, President Trump has repeatedly threatened to impose big tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico.
And in recent days, he’s made it clear: Yes, he really means all imports.
“We don’t need them to make our cars, we make a lot of them. We don’t need their lumber because we have our own forests,” he told Davos attendees last week. “We don’t need their oil and gas, we have more than anybody.”
The president is mistaken about the American fossil fuel industry — at least in its current structure. Even though the United States is the world’s No. 1 producer of oil and natural gas, the industry really doesdepend on oil imported from its neighbors, especially Canada. If Trump makes good on his threats to tariff oil imports from Canada and Mexico, then he will cost the American oil and gas industry tens of billions of dollars while causing gasoline prices to rise across much of the country.
That’s because not all petroleum is created equal. The type of crude that oozes out of wells in Alberta and Saskatchewan is not identical to what’s extracted by frackers in Texas and Oklahoma. But the types of petroleum now produced in Canada and in America pair especially well together — meaning that if the price of Canadian oil goes up, then American refineries, as well as American consumers, will pay the price.
That could hurt the president’s ability to fulfill one of his core promises. In his inaugural address, Trump promised to “rapidly bring down costs and prices” in part by fighting “escalating energy costs.” Levying tariffs on Canadian oil imports would likely raise energy prices.
But it could have more complicated environmental effects. Western Canadian petroleum has a higher carbon intensity than other crude oils, and American climate activists fought last decade to keep it from entering the United States. Trump, counterintuitively, could succeed more thoroughly than they did.
To understand why, you have to know a little bit of chemistry — and a bit of history, too.
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We often talk about oil as an homogenous and fungible commodity, but that’s not really true. In reality, oil and natural gas usually come out of the ground as a slurry of hydrocarbons.
A hydrocarbon is a chain of hydrogen and carbon atoms bonded together. Sometimes those chains are relatively short — as in methane, the major component of natural gas — and sometimes they’re longer — as in octane, a liquid and a major component of gasoline. As the number of carbon atoms keeps growing, the substance starts to get waxier until the chains get absolutely enormous and become the kind of molecule you find in coal. Nitrogen, oxygen, and sulfur atoms are sometimes jammed into the hydrocarbon chains too.
In other words, all fossil fuels exist on a spectrum — and crude oil, a melange of hydrocarbons of different lengths and properties, occupies the messy middle. Those properties can vary based on how and why in the past a crude field formed. Petroleum engineers classify it along two axes:
American fracking wells tend to produce light, sweet crude. The oil from Alberta is heavy and sour.
Normally, heavy and sour oil trades at a discount compared to light and sweet oil. That’s because the highest volume products that come out of a refinery — gasoline or jet fuel, for instance — are made of short hydrocarbons, not long ones. Light, sweet crudes are closer to the finished product, and thus require less refining.
Yet heavy, sour crudes are crucial to the U.S. oil industry anyway. American refiners use heavy crudes to bring down their input costs for refined products such as gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel.
Why? That’s where the history comes in.
Nearly two decades ago, as oil prices reached painful highs as global demand outstripped supply, many refineries across the United States began to invest in technologies that would let them break down heavier, sour petroleum into something more commercially viable. They built coking refineries, expensive pieces of equipment that use extreme heat to break down long hydrocarbon chains into shorter ones. The cost of such a refinery can exceed $10 billion. Many were purpose-built for breaking down the sludgy, sour oil coming from Canada.
In the early 2010s, as the fracking revolution turned the United States into an oil-drilling superpower, those coking refineries remained important. They helped stretch the value out of the light, tight crude coming out of fracking wells, Rory Johnston, an oil markets analyst and the author of the Commodity Context newsletter, told me last week.
It does not make sense to use the coking refineries on oil from fracking wells, because that oil is already largely composed of short-chain hydrocarbons. But by breaking down Canadian oil in coking refineries, and blending it with American oil, the industry can make a wider blend of producers at a lower cost.
“Heavy crude’s cheaper, and they want to refine this into valuable end products,” Johnston said in a separate conversation recorded this week on Heatmap’s Shift Key podcast. “And so because of this, to just run light crude through that, you would instantly render economically worthless all of this very, very expensive equipment.”
Many of America’s refineries — especially those in the Midwest — are now tuned specifically to process light fracking oil and heavy Canadian sludge together, he said. What this means in practice is that the United States exports as a finished product much of the crude oil that it imports from Canada. Under the current situation, the U.S. earns more money selling refined products made from Canadian crude than it spends importing raw petroleum from Canada, Johnston added.
Tariffs will collapse the price relationships that allow for that mutually beneficial situation to persist. It will boost the cost of Canadian oil by at least $5 a barrel on each side of the border, raising pump prices by about 13 cents in the Midwest, Johnston told me.
That may not sound so bad for consumers. But it would be terrible for refiners. “The total effect of Trump’s actions so far is to nuke the economics of U.S. coking refineries. It’s truly magnificent,” he said. “You couldn’t create a better scenario to destroy the economics of U.S. coking refineries.”
If U.S. oil companies lose access to cheap Canadian oil, they will struggle to replace it. That’s because the next best place to get heavy, sour crude is Mexico — and Mexican imports, too, would likely face 25% tariffs under most scenarios where Canada is levied. The next places to get heavy, sour crude are Venezuela (where the Trump administration wants to tighten sanctions) and Colombia (where Trump nearly imposed tariffs last weekend).
One reason Canadian oil is so cheap in the United States is that companies have invested billions integrating the two countries’ oil infrastructure. A network of pipelines and storage tanks bring millions of barrels of oil from Canada down to the U.S. Gulf Coast every day. The countries — and especially their fossil fuel industries — are interdependent.
Meanwhile, only one pipeline system — the Trans Mountain pipeline — connects Alberta’s oil fields to the Pacific coast.
If you begin to play out how each country might react to a tariff, Johnston said, “you get into these completely absurd scenario discussions,” Johnston said. “The result is everyone would be poorer in that scenario.”
None other than the U.S. oil industry itself has opposed the tariffs.
“We import a lot of oil from both Mexico and Canada, and we refine it here in the most sophisticated refinery system in the world,” Mike Sommers, the CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, said at an event in Washington last week. “We’re going to continue to work with the Trump administration on this so that they understand how important it is that we continue these trade relationships.”
On Monday, The Wall Street Journal reported that some Trump aides are eager to hit Canada and Mexico with tariffs this weekend, even though the president has yet to reopen talks — or even describe his demands — for a reworked U.S.-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement. Canadian and Mexican officials have said that they are not sure what Trump actually wants in the talks.
One irony of this fracas is that the tariffs would have a more uncertain environmental effect. Western Canadian crude is unusually carbon-intensive to extract and refine. If its price rose — or if Canadian officials responded to tariffs in part by shutting down production — then Trump could accidentally, if marginally, decrease carbon emissions. American refineries might also respond to tariffs by importing heavy, sour crude oil from abroad, essentially just shifting production around the planet.
Still, it remains ridiculous that Trump, who has spent his first days in the White House attacking a “Green New Deal” agenda that never actually passed Congress, might succeed in raising the cost of oil consumption and production in the U.S. where a decade of climate activism has largely failed.
Perhaps that’s why many still doubt it would happen. On Wednesday morning, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico said that she did not think Trump would ultimately impose sanctions on her country. And even within the oil industry, tariffs on Canadian oil seem unthinkable. A 25% tariff would whack the industry hardest, even though it has allied itself closely with Trump. Trump’s likely energy secretary, Chris Wright, is the CEO of Liberty Energy, an oilfield services company.
“A lot of the people I’m hearing on the Canadian side are saying, ‘Maybe we should try to speak with these people around Trump. Maybe Wright or [Trump’s energy czar Doug] Burgum understand what’s happening,’” Johnston said.
But Trump has already made demands that strike the North American oil industry as bizarre. At the same Davos meeting where he said the United States didn’t need Canadian oil, Trump demanded that OPEC and Saudi Arabia cut global oil prices so that global interest rates could fall. Such a move would cut profits in the American oil industry while hampering Trump’s goal of increasing U.S. oil production.
The irony that a Republican president would push off Canadian crude to increase America’s reliance on OPEC is hard to comprehend, Johnston said.
“I don’t know that anyone has a great sense of where Trump’s true philosophical anchor is,” he said, “other than that we are now getting a clear picture that he views any and all trade deficits as a sin unto themselves.”
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Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills, as well as the oft-cited increase in greenhouse gas emissions
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.
If you live in Illinois or Massachusetts, you may yet get your robust electric vehicle infrastructure.
Robust incentive programs to build out electric vehicle charging stations are alive and well — in Illinois, at least. ComEd, a utility provider for the Chicago area, is pushing forward with $100 million worth of rebates to spur the installation of EV chargers in homes, businesses, and public locations around the Windy City. The program follows up a similar $87 million investment a year ago.
Federal dollars, once the most visible source of financial incentives for EVs and EV infrastructure, are critically endangered. Automakers and EV shoppers fear the Trump administration will attack tax credits for purchasing or leasing EVs. Executive orders have already suspended the $5 billion National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure Formula Program, a.k.a. NEVI, which was set up to funnel money to states to build chargers along heavily trafficked corridors. With federal support frozen, it’s increasingly up to the automakers, utilities, and the states — the ones with EV-friendly regimes, at least — to pick up the slack.
Illinois’ investment has been four years in the making. In 2021, the state established an initiative to have a million EVs on its roads by 2030, and ComEd’s new program is a direct outgrowth. The new $100 million investment includes $53 million in rebates for business and public sector EV fleet purchases, $38 million for upgrades necessary to install public and private Level 2 and Level 3 chargers, stations for non-residential customers, and $9 million to residential customers who buy and install home chargers, with rebates of up to $3,750 per charger.
Massachusetts passed similar, sweeping legislation last November. Its bill was aimed to “accelerate clean energy development, improve energy affordability, create an equitable infrastructure siting process, allow for multistate clean energy procurements, promote non-gas heating, expand access to electric vehicles and create jobs and support workers throughout the energy transition.” Amid that list of hifalutin ambition, the state included something interesting and forward-looking: a pilot program of 100 bidirectional chargers meant to demonstrate the power of vehicle-to-grid, vehicle-to-home, and other two-way charging integrations that could help make the grid of the future more resilient.
Many states, blue ones especially, have had EV charging rebates in places for years. Now, with evaporating federal funding for EVs, they have to take over as the primary benefactor for businesses and residents looking to electrify, as well as a financial level to help states reach their public targets for electrification.
Illinois, for example, saw nearly 29,000 more EVs added to its roads in 2024 than 2023, but that growth rate was actually slower than the previous year, which mirrors the national narrative of EV sales continuing to grow, but more slowly than before. In the time of hostile federal government, the state’s goal of jumping from about 130,000 EVs now to a million in 2030 may be out of reach. But making it more affordable for residents and small businesses to take the leap should send the numbers in the right direction, as will a state-backed attempt to create more public EV chargers.
The private sector is trying to juice charger expansion, too. Federal funding or not, the car companies need a robust nationwide charging network to boost public confidence as they roll out more electric offerings. Ionna — the charging station partnership funded by the likes of Hyundai, BMW, General Motors, Honda, Kia, Mercedes-Benz, Stellantis, and Toyota — is opening new chargers at Sheetz gas stations. It promises to open 1,000 new charging bays this year and 30,000 by 2030.
Hyundai, being the number two EV company in America behind much-maligned Tesla, has plenty at stake with this and similar ventures. No surprise, then, that its spokesperson told Automotive Dive that Ionna doesn’t rely on federal dollars and will press on regardless of what happens in Washington. Regardless of the prevailing winds in D.C., Hyundai/Kia is motivated to support a growing national network to boost the sales of models on the market like the Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6, as well as the company’s many new EVs in the pipeline. They’re not alone. Mercedes-Benz, for example, is building a small supply of branded high-power charging stations so its EV drivers can refill their batteries in Mercedes luxury.
The fate of the federal NEVI dollars is still up in the air. The clearinghouse on this funding shows a state-by-state patchwork. More than a dozen states have some NEVI-funded chargers operational, but a few have gotten no further than having their plans for fiscal year 2024 approved. Only Rhode Island has fully built out its planned network. It’s possible that monies already allocated will go out, despite the administration’s attempt to kill the program.
In the meantime, Tesla’s Supercharger network is still king of the hill, and with a growing number of its stations now open to EVs from other brands (and a growing number of brands building their new EVs with the Tesla NACS charging port), Superchargers will be the most convenient option for lots of electric drivers on road trips. Unless the alternatives can become far more widespread and reliable, that is.
The increasing state and private focus on building chargers is good for all EV drivers, starting with those who haven’t gone in on an electric car yet and are still worried about range or charger wait times on the road to their destination. It is also, by the way, good news for the growing number of EV folks looking to avoid Elon Musk at all cost.