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If you haven’t already, get to know the “border adjustment.”
While climate policy has become increasingly partisan, there also exists a strange, improbably robust bipartisan coalition raising support for something like a carbon tax.
There are lots of different bills and approaches floating out there, but the most popular is the “border adjustment” tax, basically an emissions-based tariff, which, as a concept, is uniquely suited to resolve two brewing trade issues. One is the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism, which will force essentially everybody else to play by its carbon pricing system. Then there’s the fact that China powers its world-beating export machine with coal, plugged into an electrical grid that is far dirtier than America’s.
For Republicans, some kind of tax on imports would be a way of leveling the playing field in the face of what are, to their minds, punitive environmental restrictions on American energy producers and manufacturers. For Democrats, a border adjustment could be appealing both as a way to favor American manufacturing and as a way of encouraging other countries to clean up their grids.
There are currently two carbon border adjustment bills bouncing around the Senate, one introduced by Louisiana Republican Bill Cassidy — whose record on climate is far friendlier than many of his GOP colleagues’ — and the other by Rhode Island Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse, one of the most active and vocal Democratic senators on environmental issues.
In a hearing on the challenge of load growth before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Cassidy raised the issue of China’s energy mix, arguing that coal plants on the country’s Pacific coast mean at more pollutants in the United States.
“To the degree that our energy policy increases the cost of energy, and therefore encourages someone to move to China, we are actually worsening global greenhouse gas emissions because we’re increasing consumption of Chinese coal-fired electricity as opposed to clean-burning U.S. electricity,” Cassidy said during the hearing.
“Right on, brother,” the committee’s chair, Democrat Joe Manchin, responded.
Cassidy and Manchin both represent states that are major fossil fuel producers and are no one’s ideas of climate hawks — although they both support some version of permitting reform and Manchin’s was a crucial vote to pass the Inflation Reduction Act — they nevertheless represent two pillars of the idiosyncratic alliance that could get a border adjustment tax over the line. Add in Democratic climate hawks who are also interested in permitting reform such as Whitehouse and California Representative Scott Peters and Republicans who are, in their own way, open to some kind of climate change policy, including Cassidy and Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, and this thing starts to look possible.
The first step would be devising a way to calculate how clean the U.S. electricity system is compared to the rest of the world — and lo, there’s a bill for that too: the PROVE IT Act, which passed out of the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee in January.
That bill, introduced by Delaware Democrat Chris Coons and North Dakota Republican Kevin Cramer, would mandate the Department of Energy measure and report the emissions intensity for 17 categories of products (including fossil fuels) in the United States and a host of other countries. The intent of the bill is to demonstrate that, in many cases, U.S. manufacturing is cleaner than many other countries’, especially China, at least when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions.
The bill managed to win not just from Senators on both sides of the aisle, but also from industry groups that are often somewhere from skeptical to outright opposed to emissions restrictions. These include the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. (The American Petroleum Institute is even gathering up a list of House Republicans who could support a version of the bill in that chamber, reported E&E News.) The bill has also been endorsed by a host of more centrist and right-leaning climate and environmental groups, including the Climate Leadership Council and Third Way, a moderate Democratic group.
Armed with the data from the PROVE IT Act, explained the Bipartisan Policy Center's Xan Fishman, the U.S. would be “able to use that in trade negotiations, or with a new border carbon policy.”
The time for the PROVE IT Act and then a border adjustment bill may be this year, Fishman told me, citing bipartisan support for the idea — or else sometime next year, when many of the Trump tax cuts expire, setting off a scramble for revenue to pay for extending popular tax breaks.
“When you have a big giant tax bill where you’re extending or creating new tax credits and you’re looking for revenue to offset that,” Fishman said, suddenly a border adjustment could look pretty handy.
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We’re powering data centers every which way these days.
The energy giant ExxonMobil is planning a huge investment in natural gas-fired power plants that will power data centers directly, a.k.a. behind the meter, meaning they won’t have to connect to the electric grid. That will allow the fossil fuel giant to avoid making the expensive transmission upgrades that tend to slow down the buildout of new electricity generation. And it’ll add carbon capture to boot.
The company said in a corporate update that it plans to build facilities that “would use natural gas to generate a significant amount of high-reliability electricity for a data center,” then use carbon capture to “remove more than 90% of the associated CO2 emissions, then transport the captured CO2 to safe, permanent storage deep underground.” Going behind the meter means that this generation “can be installed at a pace that other alternatives, including U.S. nuclear power, cannot match,” the company said.
The move represents a first for Exxon, which is famous for its far-flung operations to extract and process oil and natural gas but has not historically been in the business of supplying electricity to customers. The company is looking to generate 1.5 gigawatts of power, about 50% more than a large nuclear reactor, The New York Timesreported.
Exxon’s announcement comes as thepower industry has reached an inflection point thanks to new demand from data centers to power artificial intelligence, electrification of transportation and heating, and new manufacturing investment. The demand for new power is immense, yet the industry’s ability to provide it quickly is limited both by the intermittent nature of cheap renewable power like solar and storage — plus the transmission capacity it requires — and by theregulatory barriers and market uncertainty around building new natural gas and nuclear power. While technology companies are starting to invest in bringing more nuclear power onto the grid,those projects won’t begin to bear fruit until the 2030s at the earliest.
Exxon is also not the only energy giant looking at behind-the-meter gas.
“This county is blessed with an abundance of natural gas,” Chevron chief executive Mike Wirthsaid at a recent event hosted by the Atlantic Council. “I think what we’re likely to see is that gas turbine generation is going to be a big part of the solution set, and a lot of it may be what’s called behind the meter … to support data centers.”
At the same time, the so-called hyperscalers are still making massive investments in renewables. Google, the investment firm TPG, and the energy developer Intersectannounced a $20 billion investment “to synchronize new clean power generation with data center growth in a novel way,” Google’s President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat wrote in a company blog post on Tuesday.
While Google was a pioneer in developing new renewable power to offset emissions from its operations and recently formed a partnership with Microsoft and the steel company Nucor to foster energy technology that can deliver clean power 24/7, this new project will be focused on “co-locating grid-connected carbon-free energy and data center investments into closely-linked infrastructure projects.”
These projects — the data centers and the clean power generation — would be sited close to each other, however they would not be behind the meter, a Google executive told Canary Media. Instead, Intersect will build “new clean energy assets in regions and projects of interest,” according to the blog post with Google then acting as an offtaker for the power “as an anchor tenant in the co-located industrial park that would support data center development.” The Google data center and the Intersect-built power “would come online alongside its own clean power, bringing new generation capacity to the grid to meet our load, reduce time to operation and improve grid reliability.”
“This partnership is an evolution of the way hyperscalers and power providers have previously worked together,” Sheldon Kimber, Intersect chief executive, said in a press release. “We can and are developing innovative solutions to rapidly expand clean power capacity at scale while reducing the strain on the grid.”
But ... how?
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday rocked the energy world when he promised “fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals” for “Any person or company investing ONE BILLION DOLLARS, OR MORE, in the United States of America,” in a post on Truth Social Tuesday.
“GET READY TO ROCK!!!” he added.
Trump has frequently derided regulatory barriers to development, including in his announcements of various economic and policy roles in his upcoming administration. His designee for Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, for instance, will also head a
National Energy Council that will “oversee the path to U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape … by focusing on INNOVATION over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”
When Trump
announced his nomination of Lee Zeldin to head the Environmental Protection Agency, he said Zeldin would “ensure fair and swift deregulatory decisions that will be enacted in a way to unleash the power of American business.”
Current interpretations of existing laws dictate that any project constituting a major federal action (e.g. one that uses public lands) must be reviewed under the National Environmental Policy Act, the country’s signature permitting law. Federal courts are often asked in litigation to sign off on whether that review process — although not the outcome — was sufficient.
Regardless of any changes Trump may make to the federal regulatory system as president, that infrastructure is already in flux. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals recently issued a ruling that throws into doubt decades of NEPA enforcement. Also on Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard a separate case on the limits of NEPA as it relates to aproposed rail line expansion to transport oil from Utah’s Uinta Basin to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. Although the court is unlikely to issue a decision until next year, its current membership has shown itself plenty willing to scrap longstanding precedent in the name of cutting the regulatory state down to size.
Trump did not support his announcement with any additional materials laying out the legal authorities he plans to exercise to exempt these projects from regulation or proposed legislation, but it already attracted criticism from environmentalists, with the Sierra Club describing it as a “plan to sell out communities and environment to the highest bidder.It’s also unclear whether Trump was referring to foreign direct investment in the United States, of which there was $177 billion in 2022,according to the Department of Commerce.
Trump’s appointed co-deregulator-in-chief, for one, approved of his message today. “This is awesome 🚀🇺🇸,” Elon Musk wrote on X in response.
Companies are racing to finish the paperwork on their Department of Energy loans.
Of the over $13 billion in loans and loan guarantees that the Energy Department’s Loan Programs Office has made under Biden, nearly a third of that funding has been doled out in the month since the presidential election. And of the $41 billion in conditional commitments — agreements to provide a loan once the borrower satisfies certain preconditions — that proportion rises to nearly half. That includes some of the largest funding announcements in the office’s history: more than $7.5 billion to StarPlus Energy for battery manufacturing, $4.9 billion to Grain Belt Express for a transmission project, and nearly $6.6 billion to the electric vehicle company Rivian to support its new manufacturing facility in Georgia.
The acceleration represents a clear push by the outgoing Biden administration to get money out the door before President-elect Donald Trump, who has threatened to hollow out much of the Department of Energy, takes office. Still, there’s a good chance these recent conditional commitments won’t become final before the new administration takes office, as that process involves checking a series of nontrivial boxes that include performing due diligence, addressing or mitigating various project risks, and negotiating financing terms. And if the deals aren’t finalized before Trump takes office, they’re at risk of being paused or cancelled altogether, something the DOE considers unwise, to put it lightly.
“It would be irresponsible for any government to turn its back on private sector partners, states, and communities that are benefiting from lower energy costs and new economic opportunities spurred by LPO’s investments,” a spokesperson wrote to me in an email.
The once nearly dormant LPO has had a renaissance under the Biden administration and the office’s current director, Jigar Shah. The Inflation Reduction Act supercharged its lending authority to $400 billion, from just $40 billion when Biden took office. Then a week after the election, the office announced that it had recalibrated its risk estimates for the loan guarantees that it makes under the Energy Infrastructure Reinvestment program, which works to modernize and repurpose existing energy infrastructure to make it cleaner and more energy efficient. As the office explained, these projects “may reflect a relatively moderate risk profile in comparison to typical projects LPO finances with higher project risk.” When there’s less risk involved, LPO doesn’t have to set aside as much money to cover a possible default, which in this case has allowed the office to more than quadruple its funding for qualifying projects.
It’s not just that LPO staffers are working fast, though that’s part of it — it’s also that loan beneficiaries have picked up their pace in responding to the LPO. As Shah emphasized today at the LPO’s second annual Demonstrate Deploy Decarbonize conference, finalizing conditional commitments largely depends on companies getting their ducks in a row as quickly as possible. “I do think that right now borrowers are sufficiently motivated to move more quickly than they have probably a year ago,” Shah said. “It's up to the borrowers. Our process hasn’t changed. Their ability to move through it faster is in their control.”
Shah noted that though timelines may be accelerating, the office’s due diligence procedures have remained the same. Thus far, the project that has moved the fastest from a conditional commitment to a finalized loan was for a clean hydrogen and energy storage facility in Utah. That took 43 days, and there are 46 left in Biden’s presidency. Let’s see what the LPO can do.