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Sparks

Europe Will Be Stuck With American Natural Gas For Decades

The European Commission’s director general for energy lets the cat out of the bag.

Natural gas pipelines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, Europe had to scramble for natural gas from a country that much of the continent wasn’t in a proxy war against. American liquefied natural gas exporters were more than happy to step up, with exports to Europe rising some 141 percent from 2021 to 2022.

And it appears like the European dependence on natural gas exports from the United States isn’t going away anytime soon. Bloomberg reported today that a major German utility, Uniper, has negotiated an LNG deal through the late 2030s.

Europe is stuck between its aggressive climate commitments and its enduring need for natural gas, a need that America’s booming oil-and-gas export sector is eager to fill, even as the United States finally ostensibly has a climate change policy aimed at transitioning its domestic economy to lower emissions.

Ditte Juul Jørgensen, the European Commission’s Director General for Energy, told the Financial Times “we will need some fossil molecules in the system over the coming couple of decades. And in that context, there will be a need for American energy,” indicating that despite Europe’s intensive efforts to transition to renewables, imported fossil fuels will be playing a large role in their economy even as it approaches the middle of the century.


While green-minded Europe is reaffirming its dependence on American natural gas, green groups in the United States have never been more wary of the natural gas industry, which has gone from a “bridge fuel” in the eyes of some environmentalists to a methane-leaking fracked colossus.

The influential environmental activist and writer Bill McKibben flagged in the New Yorker the upcoming licensing decision for Calcasieu Pass 2, an LNG export terminal planned to be built aside the existing Calcasieu Pass terminal in Southwest Louisiana that would export 20 million metric tons of liquefied natural gas per year. He called the project a “poster child for late-stage petrocapitalism” that “would help lock in the planet’s reliance on fossil fuels long past what scientists have identified as the breaking point for the climate system.”

Of the 9.25 million metric tons that Venture Global, the company behind the project, has said it has already contracted to sell, about a third will go to Germany.

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Sparks

The Trump Administration Helped a Solar Farm

In the name of “energy dominance,” no less.

Solar panels.
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The Trump administration just did something surprising: It paved the way for a transmission line to a solar energy project.

On Friday, the Bureau of Land Management approved the Gen-Tie transmission line and associated facilities for the Sapphire Solar project, a solar farm sited on private lands in Riverside County, California, that will provide an estimated 117 megawatts to the Southern California Public Power Authority.

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For those keeping score, that’s three more than wanted to preserve them last year.

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The Country’s Largest Power Markets Are Getting More Gas

Three companies are joining forces to add at least a gigawatt of new generation by 2029. The question is whether they can actually do it.

Natural gas pipelines.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

Two of the biggest electricity markets in the country — the 13-state PJM Interconnection, which spans the Mid-Atlantic and the Midwest, and ERCOT, which covers nearly all of Texas — want more natural gas. Both are projecting immense increases in electricity demand thanks to data centers and electrification. And both have had bouts of market weirdness and dysfunction, with ERCOT experiencing spiky prices and even blackouts during extreme weather and PJM making enormous payouts largely to gas and coal operators to lock in their “capacity,” i.e. their ability to provide power when most needed.

Now a trio of companies, including the independent power producer NRG, the turbine manufacturer GE Vernova, and a subsidiary of the construction firm Kiewit Corporation, are teaming up with a plan to bring gas-powered plants to PJM and ERCOT, the companies announced today.

The three companies said that the new joint venture “will work to advance four projects totaling over 5 gigawatts” of natural gas combined cycle plants to the two power markets, with over a gigawatt coming by 2029. The companies said that they could eventually build 10 to 15 gigawatts “and expand to other areas across the U.S.”

So far, PJM and Texas’ call for new gas has been more widely heard than answered. The power producer Calpine said last year that it would look into developing more gas in PJM, but actual investment announcements have been scarce, although at least one gas plant scheduled to close has said it would stay open.

So far, across the country, planned new additions to the grid are still overwhelmingly solar and battery storage, according to the Energy Information Administration, whose data shows some 63 gigawatts of planned capacity scheduled to be added this year, with more than half being solar and over 80% being storage.

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