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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 does depend 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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On Neil Jacobs’ confirmation hearing, OBBBA costs, and Saudi Aramco
Current conditions: Temperatures are climbing toward 100 degrees Fahrenheit in central and eastern Texas, complicating recovery efforts after the floods • More than 10,000 people have been evacuated in southwestern China due to flooding from the remnants of Typhoon Danas • Mebane, North Carolina, has less than two days of drinking water left after its water treatment plant sustained damage from Tropical Storm Chantal.
Neil Jacobs, President Trump’s nominee to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, fielded questions from the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee on Wednesday about how to prevent future catastrophes like the Texas floods, Politico reports. “If confirmed, I want to ensure that staffing weather service offices is a top priority,” Jacobs said, even as the administration has cut more than 2,000 staff positions this year. Jacobs also told senators that he supports the president’s 2026 budget, which would further cut $2.2 billion from NOAA, including funding for the maintenance of weather models that accurately forecast the Texas storms. During the hearing, Jacobs acknowledged that humans have an “influence” on the climate, and said he’d direct NOAA to embrace “new technologies” and partner with industry “to advance global observing systems.”
Jacobs previously served as the acting NOAA administrator from 2019 through the end of Trump’s first term, and is perhaps best remembered for his role in the “Sharpiegate” press conference, in which he modified a map of Hurricane Dorian’s storm track to match Trump’s mistaken claim that it would hit southern Alabama. The NOAA Science Council subsequently investigated Jacobs and found he had violated the organization’s scientific integrity policy.
The Republican budget reconciliation bill could increase household energy costs by $170 per year by 2035 and $353 per year by 2040, according to a new analysis by Evergreen Action, a climate policy group. “Biden-era provisions, now cut by the GOP spending plan, were making it more affordable for families to install solar panels to lower utility bills,” the report found. The law also cut building energy efficiency credits that had helped Americans reduce their bills by an estimated $1,250 per year. Instead, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will increase wholesale electricity prices almost 75% by 2035, as well as eliminate 760,000 jobs by the end of the decade. Separately, an analysis by the nonpartisan think tank Center for American Progress found that the OBBBA could increase average electricity costs by $110 per household as soon as next year, and up to $200 annually in some states.
EIA
Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil company Saudi Aramco is in talks with Commonwealth LNG in Louisiana to buy liquified natural gas, Reuters reports. The discussion is reportedly for 2 million tons per year of the facility’s 9.4 million-ton annual export capacity, which would help “cement Aramco’s push into the global LNG market as it accelerates efforts to diversify beyond crude oil exports” and be the “strongest signal yet that Aramco intends to take a material position in the U.S. LNG sector,” OilPrice.com notes. LNG demand is expected to grow 50% globally by 2030, but as my colleague Emily Pontecorvo has reported, President Trump’s tariffs could make it harder for LNG projects still in early development, like Commonwealth, to succeed. “For the moment, U.S. LNG is still interesting,” Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a research scholar focused on natural gas at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, told Emily. “But if costs increase too much, maybe people will start to wonder.”
Ford confirmed this week that its $3 billion electric vehicle battery plant in Michigan will still qualify for federal tax credits due to eleventh-hour tweaks to the bill’s language, The New York Times reports. Though Ford had said it would build its factory regardless of what happened to the credits, the company’s executive chairman had previously called them “crucial” to the construction of the facility and the employment of the 1,700 people expected to work there. Ford’s battery plant is located in Michigan’s Calhoun County, which Trump won by a margin of 56%. The last-minute tweaks to save the credits to the benefit of Ford “suggest that at least some Republican lawmakers were aware that cuts in the bill would strike their constituents the hardest,” the Times writes.
Italy and Spain are on track to shutter their last remaining mainland coal power plants in the next several months, marking “a major milestone in Europe’s transition to a predominantly renewables-based power system by 2035,” Beyond Fossil Fuels reported Wednesday. To date, 15 European countries now have coal-free grids following Ireland’s move away from coal in 2025.
Italy is set to complete its transition from coal by the end of the summer with the closure of its last two plants, in keeping with the government’s 2017 phase-out target of 2025. Two coal plants in Sardinia will remain operational until 2028 due to complications with an undersea grid connection cable. In Spain, the nation’s largest coal plant will be entirely converted to fossil gas by the end of the year, while two smaller plants are also on track to shut down in the immediate future. Once they do, Spain’s only coal-power plant will be in the Balearic Islands, with an expected phase-out date of 2030.
“Climate change makes this a battle with a ratchet. There are some things you just can’t come back from. The ratchet has clicked, and there is no return. So it is urgent — it is time for us all to wake up and fight.” — Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island in his 300th climate speech on the Senate floor Wednesday night.
Some of the Loan Programs Office’s signature programs are hollowed-out shells.
With a stroke of President Trump’s Sharpie, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is now law, stripping the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office of much of its lending power. The law rescinds unobligated credit subsidies for a number of the office’s key programs, including portions of the $3.6 billion allocated to the Loan Guarantee Program, $5 billion for the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, $3 billion for the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, and $75 million for the Tribal Energy Loan Guarantee Program.
Just three years ago, the Inflation Reduction Act supercharged LPO, originally established in 2005 to help stand up innovative new clean energy technologies that weren’t yet considered bankable for the private sector, expanding its lending authority to roughly $400 billion. While OBBBA leaves much of the office’s theoretical lending authority intact, eliminating credit subsidies means that it no longer really has the tools to make use of those dollars.
Credit subsidies represent the expected cost to the government of providing a loan or a loan guarantee — including the possibility of a default — and thus how much money Congress must set aside to cover these potential losses. So by axing these subsidies, Congress is effectively limiting the amount of lending that the LPO can undertake, given that many third-party lenders would be reluctant to finance riskier, more novel, or larger projects in the absence of federal credit support.
“The LPO is statutorily allowed to take loans on its books to finance these projects in these categories, but it has no credit subsidy by which to take the risk required to do so,” Advait Arun, senior associate of energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise and a Heatmap contributor, told me.
The particular programs that have been eliminated support new and improved energy technologies, clean energy infrastructure, fuel efficient vehicles, and help native communities access energy project financing. The long-running Loan Guarantee Program and the advanced vehicles program in particular are behind some of the best known LPO efforts, supporting companies such as Tesla, Ford, and NextEra Energy, and projects such as Georgia’s Vogtle nuclear reactors, the Thacker Pass lithium mine, and Shepherd’s Flat, one of the world’s largest wind farms.
The Loan Guarantees Program is “the big Kahuna,” Arun told me. “This is the longest-standing program of the LPO. So to see this defunded is like, you’re decapitating the LPO’s crown jewel.”
The program only has about $11 million left over in credit subsidies, consisting of funding that it received prior to the IRA’s appropriations. That won’t be enough to make any meaningful loans, Arun said, and is more likely to be used to “keep a skeleton crew online” for any remaining administrative tasks.
Then there’s the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment Program, which the IRA stood up with a whopping $250 billion in lending authority to transition and transform existing fossil fuel infrastructure for clean energy purposes. Now, OBBBA has axed the program’s remaining $5 billion in credit subsidies and replaced it with $1 billion in new subsidies for projects that “retool, repower, repurpose, or replace” existing energy infrastructure, with a focus on expanding capacity and output as opposed to decarbonizing the economy. It also refashioned the program as the predictably-named “Energy Dominance Financing” initiative.
The new-old program — which the law extended through 2028 — no longer requires LPO-funded infrastructure to reduce or sequester emissions, broadening the office’s lending authority to include support for fossil fuel and critical minerals projects. It also adds language encouraging the LPO to “support or enable the provision of known or forecastable electric supply,” which Arun fears is a “backend way of penalizing the addition of renewable energy” on previously developed land.
“Under the Trump administration’s direction, [the LPO] can use that term, ‘known and forecastable,’ to actually just say, well, guess what? Renewables are not known or forecastable because they are intermittent due to the weather,” Arun told me. So while government and private industry were once excited about, say, turning sites originally developed for coal mining or coal ash disposal into solar and battery facilities, those days are probably over.
Carbon capture in particular stands to suffer from this reprogramming, Arun said, explaining that while the Biden LPO saw potential in adding carbon capture to natural gas and coal plants, its current incarnation will no longer allocate funding in any meaningful amount “because reducing emissions is no longer part of the LPO’s mandate.” Some policymakers and clean energy developers had also hoped that excess renewable energy would make it economically feasible to power the production of hydrogen fuel with renewable energy. But with this law — and really each passing day under Trump — a mass buildout of solar and wind seems less and less likely, making it doubtful that green hydrogen will move down the cost curve.
As bleak as this looks, it’s better than it could have been. There was no guarantee that Trump would keep the LPO around at all. Even in this denuded state, the office can still fund the expansion of existing nuclear projects, and perhaps even the buildout of transmission lines or battery projects on brownfield sites, Arun said, depending on how LPO’s leadership ends up interpreting what it means to “increase the capacity output of operating infrastructure.”
But in many ways, what happened with the LPO looks like another instance of the Trump administration picking winners and losers: Yes to clean, firm energy and fossil fuels, no to solar, wind, and electric vehicles.
Take the Advanced Technology Vehicle Manufacturing Program, for example. OBBBA nixed both its credit subsidies and its tens of billions of dollars in lending authority. That’s hardly a surprise, given that the Bush administration created the program in 2007 explicitly to support the domestic development and manufacture of fuel-efficient vehicles and components. But it means that unlike the LPO programs for which lending authority still stands, even if Congress wanted to, it could not redesign the advanced vehicles program to serve a more Trump-aligned purpose. Safer, I suppose, to cut off any opening for funding EVs and hybrids.
The latest LPO rescissions add to the growing list of reasons the private sector has to be wary of the consistently inconsistent landscape for federal funding, Arun told me. He worries that slashing the LPO’s authority at the same time as there’s so much uncertainty around tax credit eligibility will lead some companies to forgo federal funding opportunities altogether.
“We’ll see if private developers even want to play around with the LPO,” Arun told me, “given the uncertainty around the rest of the federal landscape here.”
Electric vehicle batteries are more efficient at lower speeds — which, with electricity prices rising, could make us finally slow down.
The contours of a 30-year-old TV commercial linger in my head. The spot, whose production value matched that of local access programming, aired on the Armed Forces Network in the 1990s when the Air Force had stationed my father overseas. In the lo-fi video, two identical military green vehicles are given the same amount of fuel and the same course to drive. The truck traveling 10 miles per hour faster takes the lead, then sputters to a stop when it runs out of gas. The slower one eventually zips by, a mechanical tortoise triumphant over the hare. The message was clear: slow down and save energy.
That a car uses a lot more energy to go fast is nothing new. Anyone who remembers the 55 miles per hour national speed limit of the 1970s and 80s put in place to counter oil shortages knows this logic all too well. But in the time of electric vehicles, when driving too fast slashes a car’s range and burns through increasingly expensive electricity, the speed penalty is front and center again. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.
You certainly can notice the cost of lead-footedness in a gasoline-powered car. It’s simpler today, when lots of vehicles have digital displays that show the miles per gallon you’re getting, than in the old days when you had to do the math yourself. An EV puts the hard efficiency math right in front of you. Battery life is often displayed in terms of estimated miles of range remaining, and those miles evaporate before your eyes if you climb a mountain or accelerate like a drag racer.
This is no academic concern, like trying to boost one’s fuel efficiency through hypermiling techniques such as gentle acceleration, downhill coasting, and killing the AC. In six years of owning a Tesla Model 3, I’ve pushed its range limits trying to reach far-flung national parks and other destinations where fast chargers are scarce. I’ve found myself in numerous situations where I’ve set the cruise control at exactly the speed limit or slightly below to make sure the car would reach the one and only charging depot in the vicinity. For particularly close calls, I’ve puttered white-knuckled with one eye on Tesla’s in-car energy app — and felt my stomach drop when I found myself underperforming its expectations.
Fortunately, slow works. Three years ago I managed a comfortable round-trip from what was then the closest Tesla Supercharger to Crater Lake National Park by driving there down a 55-mile-per-hour two-lane highway; at freeway speed, my little battery probably wouldn’t have made it. Today, my fully charged Model 3 might make it something like 130 to 140 miles at interstate speed, depending on elevation. Go a little slower and it comes close to matching the 200 miles of supposed range.
Fear is the speed-killer, sure. The chance of being stranded with a dead battery is enough for any driver to be scared straight into observing the posted limit. But having all that data at the ready had already started to affect my driving habits even when there was no danger of stranding myself. It’s hard to watch the range drop when you slam the accelerator without thinking of the Interstellar meme about how much this little maneuver is going to cost us. With the price of electricity at the fast charger rising, I’m much more conscious of wasting a few kilowatt-hours by being in a hurry.
The difference is stunningly clear in the kind of controlled range tests that car sites and EV influencers have been conducting. For example, the State of Charge YouTube channel recently drove the Cadillac Escalade IQ, the fully electric version of the status SUV that is officially rated at 465 miles of range. Driven at exactly 70 miles per hour until it ran out of juice, the big EV exceeded that estimate by traveling 481 miles. With the speedometer held at 60 miles per hour, however, the vehicle went 607 miles — more than 100 miles more.
Granted, the Caddy’s comically large 205 kilowatt-hour battery — more than three times as big as the one in my little Tesla — does the lion’s share of the work in allowing it to go so very many miles. A peek into State of Charge’s data, though, makes it clear what 10 miles per hour can do. Dropping from 70 miles per hour to 60 caused the car’s miles per kilowatt-hour figure to rise from 2.1 to 2.6 or 2.7.
That’s not to say EV ownership turns every driver into an energy-obsessed hypermiler. One blessing of the huge batteries that go into Cadillac EVs and Rivians is freeing their drivers from some of the mental burden of range calculations. With driving ranges reaching well above 300 miles, you’re going to make it to the next plug even if you drive like a maniac.
Even so, the increased awareness of the cost of electricity might make some of us reconsider the casual speeding we all do just to take a few minutes off the trip. That’s a good thing for public safety: Big EV batteries make these vehicles heavier than other cars, on average, and thus potentially more dangerous in auto accidents. And slowing down will be especially relevant as electricity prices outpace inflation. Consumer electricity prices are up nearly 5% over last year and are poised to get worse: The budget reconciliation bill signed by President Trump last week won’t help, as one projection sees it leading to an increase in annual energy bills of up to $290 by 2035.
To be honest, the biggest problem of slowing down a little isn’t really the extra time it takes to get someplace. It’s trying to conserve in a world where 5 to 10 miles per hour over the speed limit is the expectation. I once had to cross 140 miles of wind-swept New Mexico expanse from Albuquerque to Gallup on a single charge, a task that required driving 55 miles per hour in a 65 zone of the interstate, holding on tight as semi trucks flew past me in revved aggravation. We made it. But if you really want to make your electrons go farther, then be prepared to become the target of road rage by the hasty and the aggrieved.