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The Chinese EV giant doesn’t sell cars in the U.S., but it does sell buses.
The Biden administration continued its crackdown on carbon pollution from the transportation sector on Friday, finalizing tough new limits on tailpipe emissions from heavy-duty trucks and buses.
The new rules, which the Environmental Protection Agency projects will keep a billion tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere, could push more trucks and buses to use electric motors or experiment with alternative fuels. They apply to a plethora of big vehicles — delivery vans, trash trucks, city and school buses, even 18-wheelers — and go into effect starting in model year 2027.
As Camila Domonoske writes for NPR, these new rules are contentious — far more divisive than the new EPA limits on light-duty car and truck pollution that were unveiled earlier this month. While public-health groups such as the American Lung Association have celebrated the rules, citing their more than $13 billion in net benefits for the public, fossil-fuel trade groups and truckers’ lobbyists have said that they will be expensive to comply with and a “forced march toward electric vehicles.”
Of course, it was never going to be simple to fix the environmental problem posed by America’s heavy-duty vehicle fleet. The transportation sector now produces 29% of America’s carbon pollution, more than any other part of the economy. Heavy-duty trucks and buses are responsible for about a quarter of that pollution, making them second only to passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs as a driver of transportation-related emissions.
Given all the attention on these rules, I wanted to highlight two very different companies that will be affected by them. One is an automaker that is increasingly synonymous with China’s goals of creating a new global mass market for clean vehicles. The other is an all-American electric truck maker that is a particular favorite of upscale Millennial and Gen X dads.
The first is BYD, the Chinese automaker that last year surpassed Tesla as the world’s No. 1 producer of electric and plug-in vehicles. Here in America, most of the attention paid to BYD recently has focused on its zippy, unbelievably affordable electric cars, such as the $9,000 BYD Seagull.
Of course, some of that hand wringing is premature: BYD doesn’t even sell cars in the United States yet, and it’s only begun to push operations into our neighboring market of Mexico. But what BYD does sell in the U.S. is buses — a lot of them. Over the past decade, transit agencies and airports across North America have ordered more than 1,000 buses from BYD, the company says; it cites customers in California, Massachusetts, Georgia, and Louisiana. From an American perspective, BYD is and remains a bus company: It operates an electric-bus factory in Los Angeles County, California, that has been described as the largest in North America, and it recently opened bus-repair centers in New Jersey and Indiana so it could service East Coast and Midwest clients.
BYD, I should add, is not the only electric-bus maker in North America. Nova Bus, a Canadian company owned by the Volvo Group, just received the largest electric bus order in the continent’s history. The Volvo Group also recently bought part of Proterra, an American electric-bus maker that went bankrupt last year. (Somewhat confusingly, the Volvo Group, which is headquartered in Sweden, is a different company from Volvo Cars, which is owned by the Chinese automaker Geely.) Thomas Built, the iconic American maker of yellow school buses, has also unveiled a single electric model, the C2 Jouley. (Fun fact: Even though it makes an icon of Americana, Thomas Built is owned by Daimler.)
Even if BYD reaps some business from the EPA rule, it will be somewhat limited in doing so. In 2021, the Biden administration said that transit agencies could not spend federal money on manufacturers linked to China.
But BYD isn’t the only company that could stand to benefit from these new EPA rules. Another is much closer to home: the electric-truck maker, Rivian.
Although most readers will know Rivian for its rugged and neotenous electric trucks, it also makes delivery trucks and work vans. These vans were initially designed to be sold to Amazon, which owns roughly 16% of Rivian, but they have since blossomed into their own product line. Companies can now buy a Rivian Delivery 500, a chipper work van with 500 cubic feet of cargo space and 160 miles of range, for $83,000 or more.
When I’ve analyzed Rivian’s financial future recently, I haven’t focused as much on its delivery vans in part because that business seemed to be decelerating. Amazon bought fewer delivery vans in the fourth quarter of 2023 than it did in the third quarter, and while Rivian’s executives have blamed that pause on Amazon’s busy holiday-shopping season, it seemed prudent for those of us outside the company to wait and see what will happen to it more broadly. As I’ve written, Rivian needs all the cash it can muster to cross the so-called EV valley of death and survive until early 2026, when it will begin selling its affordable R2 SUV.
But perhaps these EPA rules will generate more demand for electric delivery vans than Rivian might project. If that happens, then other American automakers will be happy, too — such as Ford, whose $46,000 electric E-Transit cargo van could also help companies meet the new rules.
And automakers won’t be the only American companies who benefit. The EPA projects that the new rule’s biggest winner might be the heavy-duty trucking and cargo industry itself — truck owners and fleet operators will save $3.5 billion in fuel costs each year because of the rule, the agency says. But to conserve that money, they might have to shell out a little more at the outset for slightly more expensive vehicles. If that’s true, then the rule seems prudent, almost thrifty. After all, nobody ever said saving money would be cheap.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify limitations on the use of federal funds by transit agencies, as well as the ownership of Proterra and Thomas Built.
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Three weeks after “Liberation Day,” Matador Resources says it’s adjusting its ambitions for the year.
America’s oil and gas industry is beginning to pull back on investments in the face of tariffs and immense oil price instability — or at least one oil and gas company is.
While oil and gas executives have been grousing about low prices and inconsistent policy to any reporter (or Federal Reserve Bank) who will listen, there’s been little actual data about how the industry is thinking about what investments to make or not make. That changed on Wednesday when the shale driller Matador Resources reported its first quarter earnings. The company said that it would drop one rig from its fleet of nine, cutting $100 million of capital costs.
“In response to recent commodity price volatility, Matador has decided to adjust its drilling and completion activity for 2025 to provide for more optionality,” the company said in its earnings release.
In February, Matador was projecting that its capital expenditures in 2025 would be between $1.4 and $1.65 billion.This week, it lowered that outlook to $1.3 to $1.55 billion. “We’re very open to and want to have reason to grow again,” Matador’s chief executive Joseph Foran said on the company’s earnings call Thursday. “This is primarily a timing matter. Is this a temporary thing on oil prices? Or is this a new world we live in?”
Mizuho Securities analyst William Janela wrote in a note to clients Thursday morning that, as the first oil exploration and production company to report its earnings this go-round, Matador would be “somewhat of a litmus test for the sector: we don't believe the market was expecting E&Ps to announce activity reductions this soon, but MTDR's update could signal more cuts to come from peers over the next few weeks.”
West Texas Intermediate crude oil prices are currently sitting at just below $63, up from around $60 in the wake of President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. While the current price is off its lows, it’s still well short of the almost $84 a barrel crude prices were at around this time last year.
The price decline could be attributable to any number of factors — macroeconomic uncertainty due to the trade war, production hikes by foreign producers — but whatever the cause, it has made an awkward situation for the Trump administration’s energy strategy.
The iShares U.S. Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF, which tracks the American oil and gas exploration industry, is down 9% for the year and more than 13% since “Liberation Day,” while the rest of the market has almost recovered as the Trump administration has indicated it may ease up on some of his more drastic tariff policies.
If other drillers follow Matador’s investment slowdown, it could imperil Trump’s broader energy policy goals.
Trump has both encouraged other countries to produce more oil (and bragged about lower oil prices) while also exhorting American drillers to “drill, baby, drill,”with enticements ranging from kneecapping emissions standards to a reduced regulatory burden.
As Heatmap has written, these goals sit in conflict with each other. Energy executives told the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas that they need oil prices ranging from $61 to $70 a barrelin order to profitably drill new wells. If prices fall further, “what would happen is ‘Delay, baby, delay,’”Wood Mackenzie analyst Fraser McKay wrote Wednesday. “We now expect global upstream development spend to fall year-on-year for the first time since 2020.”
A $65 per barrel price “dents” margins for drillers, meaning “growth capex and discretionary spend will be delayed,” McKay wrote.
Matador also announced that it had authorized $400 million worth of buybacks, and itsstock price rose some 4% on the earnings announcement, indicating that Wall Street will reward drillers who pull back on drilling and ramp up shareholder payouts.
“We’ve got the tools in the toolbox, including the share repurchase, to make Matador more value quarter by quarter,” Foran said. Rather than “blindly” pouring capital into growth, Matador would aim for a “measured pace,” he explained. “And if you mean what you say about a measured pace, that means when prices get a little lower, you take a few more moments to think about what you’re doing and don’t rush into things.”
The Department of Justice included a memo in a court filing that tears down the administration’s own case against New York’s congestion pricing.
Secretary Duffy, you have no case.
That was the gist of a memo Department of Justice lawyers sent to the Department of Transportation regarding its attempt to shut down New York City’s congestion pricing program. The letter was uploaded mistakenly on Wednesday into the court record for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s lawsuit challenging Duffy’s actions. Oops.
The memo says “there is considerable litigation risk” in defending the letter Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy sent on February 19, ordering the termination of New York’s program. “It is very unlikely that Judge Liman or further courts of review will uphold the Secretary’s decision on the legal grounds articulated in the letter.” The memo goes on, however, to advise the DOT of another argument it could make that may be more successful.
The Department of Transportation has since replaced the trio of DOJ lawyers that authored the memo, The New York Times reports, and plans to transfer the case to the civil division of the Justice Department in Washington. “Are S.D.N.Y. lawyers on this case incompetent or was this their attempt to RESIST?” an agency spokeswoman told the Times in a statement.
Dated April 11, the memo was sent to the DOT after Duffy publicly affirmed the department’s demand that New York end the program by April 20, but before the secretary upped the ante of his threats to New York as the deadline passed, announcing Monday that he would put a moratorium on any new federal approvals for transit projects in Manhattan until the state shut down the tolling program.
Duffy had given two reasons that New York’s congestion pricing program, which charges drivers $9 to enter Manhattan’s central business district, violated federal statute. First, he argued that Congress only authorized tolling programs on roads where drivers have the option to take an alternative, free route. Second, he said the state had designed the program to be a revenue raiser for the MTA, New York’s state-run transit agency, rather than a true effort to reduce congestion, and therefore the toll was not set appropriately.
But the Federal Highway Administration had spent years assessing New York’s program before approving it. “Other than the Secretary’s decision itself, there is no other material supporting or explaining the DOT’s change of position,” the DOJ memo says. There’s nothing in statute that disallows a two-fold goal of raising revenue and reducing traffic. Moreover, the lawyers note, the Supreme Court’s decision last year to overturn a decades-long precedent that gave agencies broad authority to interpret their statutory mandates, will hurt Duffy’s case. They also point out that Judge Liman, the district court judge who is presiding over the case, had previously ruled that the Value Pricing Pilot Program, the federal statute under which congestion pricing was approved, was designed to support these kinds of programs.
The memo warns that continuing down this route could open up both the department and Duffy personally to further probes. “The thin administrative record may lead plaintiffs to point to these ‘gaps’ in the administrative record as justification for extra-record discovery from DOT,” it says, “including requests for production of emails and depositions of agency officials, including the Secretary in particular.”
If Duffy really wants to win this case, the DOJ advises, he should instead claim he’s revoking approvals due to “changed agency priorities,” rather than saying the program violates statute. There’s precedent for using this argument to terminate “cooperative agreements” between the federal government and third parties, and Duffy could cite the same two reasons that he’s already provided. It’s not a sure thing, the memo suggests, but it’s more defensible than the current path.
New York has refused to comply with Duffy’s demands and confirmed in a court filing on Wednesday that it would not shut down the program unless and until the court tells it to.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to reflect the removal of the memo’s authors from the case.
The Esmeralda 7 project is another sign that Trump’s solar freeze is over.
The Esmeralda 7 solar project, a collection of proposed solar farms and batteries that would encompass tens of thousands of acres of federal public lands in western Nevada, appears to be moving towards the end of its federal permitting process.
The farms developed by NextEra, Invenergy, Arevia, ConnectGen, and others together would add up to 6,200 megawatts of solar generation capacity, making it the largest solar project in already solar-rich Nevada.
To get a sense of the massive scale of the project, the two newly installed nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia are about 1,000 megawatts each and the Empire Wind offshore wind project that Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum ordered a halt to this week had a planned capacity of just over 800 megawatts.
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management updated its website for the project, indicating that the final Environmental Impact Statement for the project would be published on April 25 and the record of decision would be published on July 18.
A Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told me that the Bureau wouldn’t have anything new to share until the publication of the final environmental impact statement “in the coming days or week or so.”
Still, the fact that the BLM is making progress on a decision at all is yet another sign that the “freeze” on renewables projects put in place in the early days of the Trump administration has begun to thaw, at least for solar and transmission projects.
The new decision date is also consistent with the freeze being over. A timeline presented at a BLM meeting in September envisioned the final Environmental Impact Statement being issued sometime between the fall of last year and spring of this year, with a record of decision in April. The listed July date would roughly match with the project’s permitting being delayed by two months.
The 60-day renewable permitting pause was one of Trump’s first actions in office and the offshore wind industry especially has continued to bear the brunt of the administration’s anti-renewable wrath.
But solar and transmission appear to be a different story: a Bureau of Land Management spokesperson told Heatmap in March that “there is currently no freeze on processing renewable applications for solar” or for “making authorization decisions.” Earlier that month, BLM had approved a transmission line for a solar project in Southern California saying that the project would “Unleash American Energy.”
Like many large scale Nevada solar projects, the Esmeralda 7 has attracted some opposition from some area residents and conservation groups. The transmission line necessary for the project, Greenlink West, was approved in September.