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New ‘SAF’ Just Dropped

A natural gas refinery is being converted into a plant for jet fuel made from carbon dioxide and green hydrogen.

Emily Pontecorvo •

11/29/2023

An American airplane.

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

American Airlines will purchase sustainable aviation fuel from a first-of-its-kind facility under development in Texas called Project Roadrunner. Infinium, the company behind the project, will be converting a former natural gas refinery into a commercial “eFuels” plant where it will make jet fuel and diesel from carbon dioxide and green hydrogen. The company announced the offtake agreement on Wednesday along with a $75 million equity agreement with Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, a subsidiary of a climate tech firm backed by Bill Gates that focuses on first-of-a-kind projects. Infinium specified that it would use “waste CO2” for the process, although it did not say where the carbon would be sourced from.

Most so-called sustainable aviation fuels in use today are made from waste cooking oils and agricultural residues, but experts are skeptical they’re truly scalable. In theory, fuel made from carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere and green hydrogen could be carbon neutral, though capturing the carbon, and producing green hydrogen, requires a lot of energy.

This first appeared in Heatmap AM, a briefing on the most important climate and energy news. Sign up to get it in your inbox every week day:

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Emily Pontecorvo

Emily is a founding staff writer at Heatmap. Previously she was a staff writer at the nonprofit climate journalism outlet Grist, where she covered all aspects of decarbonization, from clean energy to electrified buildings to carbon dioxide removal.

Major Renewables Nonprofit Cuts a Third of Staff After Trump Slashes Funding

The lost federal grants represent about half the organization’s budget.

Jael Holzman •

10/17/2025

The DOE wrecking ball.

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

The Interstate Renewable Energy Council, a decades-old nonprofit that provides technical expertise to cities across the country building out renewable clean energy projects, issued a dramatic plea for private donations in order to stay afloat after it says federal funding was suddenly slashed by the Trump administration.

IREC’s executive director Chris Nichols said in an email to all of the organization’s supporters that it has “already been forced to lay off many of our high-performing staff members” after millions of federal dollars to three of its programs were eliminated in the Trump administration’s shutdown-related funding cuts last week. Nichols said the administration nixed the funding simply because the nonprofit’s corporation was registered in New York, and without regard for IREC’s work with countless cities and towns in Republican-led states. (Look no further than this map of local governments who receive the program’s zero-cost solar siting policy assistance to see just how politically diverse the recipients are.)

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Esmeralda 7 Solar Project Has Been Canceled, BLM Says

It would have delivered a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power.

Jael Holzman •

10/09/2025

Donald Trump, Doug Burgum, and solar panels.

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images, Library of Congress

The Bureau of Land Management says the largest solar project in Nevada has been canceled amidst the Trump administration’s federal permitting freeze.

Esmeralda 7 was supposed to produce a gargantuan 6.2 gigawatts of power – equal to nearly all the power supplied to southern Nevada by the state’s primary public utility. It would do so with a sprawling web of solar panels and batteries across the western Nevada desert. Backed by NextEra Energy, Invenergy, ConnectGen and other renewables developers, the project was moving forward at a relatively smooth pace under the Biden administration, albeit with significant concerns raised by environmentalists about its impacts on wildlife and fauna. And Esmeralda 7 even received a rare procedural win in the early days of the Trump administration when the Bureau of Land Management released the draft environmental impact statement for the project.

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Trump Just Suffered His First Loss on Offshore Wind

A judge has lifted the administration’s stop-work order against Revolution Wind.

Jael Holzman •

09/22/2025

Donald Trump and wind turbines.

Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images

A federal court has lifted the Trump administration’s order to halt construction on the Revolution Wind farm off the coast of New England. The decision marks the renewables industry’s first major legal victory against a federal war on offshore wind.

The Interior Department ordered Orsted — the Danish company developing Revolution Wind — to halt construction of Revolution Wind on August 22, asserting in a one-page letter that it was “seeking to address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States and prevention of interference with reasonable uses of the exclusive economic zone, the high seas, and the territorial seas.”

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