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The Department of Energy is advancing 24 companies in its purchase prize contest. What these companies are getting is more important than $50,000.
The Department of Energy is advancing its first-of-a-kind program to stimulate demand for carbon removal by becoming a major buyer. On Tuesday, the agency awarded $50,000 to each of 24 semifinalist companies competing to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere on behalf of the U.S. government. It will eventually spend $30 million to buy carbon removal credits from up to 10 winners.
The nascent carbon removal industry is desperate for customers. At a conference held in New York City last week called Carbon Unbound, startup CEOs brainstormed how to convince more companies to buy carbon removal as part of their sustainability strategies. On the sidelines, attendees lamented to me that there were hardly even any potential buyers at the conference — what a missed opportunity.
Conference panelists asserted that the industry needed to rebuild trust. Purchasing carbon credits has become a risky strategy for companies. In one investigation after another, journalists and researchers have shown that many of the projects behind these credits fail to produce the climate benefits they advertise. There’s a class action lawsuit against Delta Air Lines for marketing itself as “carbon neutral” after purchasing such questionable carbon offsets.
Carbon removal credits are technically different from the offsets that companies bought in the past, which were based on projects that reduce emissions to the atmosphere rather than remove carbon that’s already heating the planet. But there’s still a risk of sham projects. And because the field is relatively new, there’s not yet a set of widely agreed-upon standards to measure and verify how much carbon is being removed.
The Department of Energy hopes that by selecting 24 companies that have been vetted by government scientists, it’s sending a signal to the private sector that there are at least some projects that are legitimate. “We can’t wait to invest in CDR until those standards have been codified,” Noah Deich, the agency’s deputy assistant secretary of carbon management, told me. “We need to invest now so that we actually get the data that we can use to inform the standards, and then over time codify those standards and strengthen and improve them.”
The semifinalists represent a wide range of carbon removal methods. Nine of the companies are building machines that capture carbon dioxide directly from the air. Seven take advantage of the natural ability of plants and algae to suck up carbon, and have developed systems to sequester that carbon for far longer than would otherwise occur. Five employ rocks that naturally absorb carbon and have figured out how to speed up the process. The last three capture carbon from the ocean, enabling the world’s biggest carbon sink to draw down more from the atmosphere.
To proceed to the final round, all of these companies will have to draw up contracts that say how quickly they will be able to remove the promised tons of carbon, and who they will work with to measure and verify the process.
The Biden administration is spending billions on research, development, and deployment of carbon removal. Some of the semifinalists, like Climeworks, Heirloom Carbon, and 1PointFive, were already selected for grants from the DOE to build the U.S.’s first “direct air capture hubs” — projects capable of removing one million tons of carbon from the air per year. But those hubs will fail if the companies don’t ultimately find buyers for their carbon removal. “Every single CDR project that we’re seeing today requires some sort of voluntary credit sale to be profitable,” said Deich.
The Department of Energy’s $30 million budget to buy carbon removal is relatively small. The semifinalists said they could deliver a wide range of credits with their share of the funds, from 3,000 over a three-year period, to more than 30,000. In any case, DOE is unlikely to afford much more than 100,000 tons of carbon taken out of the atmosphere, equivalent to about 0.002% of the CO2 the United States emitted in 2022. When distributed among 10 companies, it’s certainly not enough to finance a project. But Deich told me he sees this contest as a public-private partnership. The agency is challenging the semifinalists to leverage the DOE’s recognition to try and sell as many credits as they can. It’s one of the criteria they’ll be judged on for the final phase of the contest.
Several semifinalists I spoke with were optimistic the DOE’s backing would help. “One of the things that the private sector is wrestling with is the technical underwriting of various carbon dioxide removal technologies,” Barclay Rogers, the CEO of the carbon removal company Graphyte, told me. Graphyte’s process almost sounds too simple to work. The company takes discarded plant matter from forests and fields, dries it out so that it doesn’t decompose, compresses it into bricks, and then buries them. Graphyte has already built a small processing facility in Arkansas and secured a burial site that could store an estimated 1.5 million tons of CO2. Rogers was excited to have DOE’s backing as “a broad signal to the market of the viability of Graphyte’s carbon casting process.”
Others were grateful that the government was branching out to new technologies. To date, most of the DOE’s carbon removal programs have supported direct air capture. Companies working on other approaches have been shut out of funding opportunities, and some worry that this has contributed to a perception among buyers that direct air capture is the only valid method. “We think this is a huge step forward, since it’s really the first time not only that the U.S. government is going to become a purchaser of carbon removal, but also funding a full range of carbon removal solutions,” Nora Cohen Brown, head of market development and policy at Charm Industrial, told me. (Charm also buries plant waste underground, but in the form of oil.) “We really think that biomass CDR has immense potential,” she said. “It’s a big deal to have DOE’s blessing for that pathway.”
Edward Sanders, the chief operating officer of a startup called Equatic, told me that being a semifinalist meant the company would be able to build a plant in the U.S. much sooner than it initially planned. Equatic has developed technology to remove carbon from seawater, enabling the ocean to take up more carbon. It’s currently building its first large-scale plant in Singapore. “This tells prospective future buyers that there is a role to play in the near term in the U.S. for a marine-based pathway.”
Many of the companies on the list, including the three I just mentioned, have already been relatively successful in selling credits. Graphyte sold 10,000 to American Airlines. Equatic has a 62,000 deal with Boeing. Charm will remove more than 100,000 tons for Frontier Climate, a group of buyers that includes Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify, and Meta. But even though a handful of tech companies and airlines are buying carbon removal, these sweeping gestures are not enough to sustain the industry, let alone grow it to the scale that scientists say will be necessary to halt climate change.
DOE’s purchase may help increase confidence in some of these companies and approaches, but it may not do much to solve another problem: There’s little incentive for anyone to pay for carbon removal today, and it’s much more expensive than other options companies have to reduce their emissions. Credits can cost between several hundred to more than a thousand dollars each.
Deich said the agency was trying to set an example for other buyers. Instead of creating a net-zero target and searching for the cheapest credits to accomplish its goal, it’s prioritizing quality and only buying what it can afford. “We need to pay what it costs,” he said, “and then developers can develop projects and figure out how to do it cheaper so that over time, it starts to come down the cost curve significantly, and we can buy larger and larger quantities.”
But this is only the near term plan to help the industry mature. Ultimately, Deich doesn’t think that the voluntary trade of credits will be enough to support the levels of carbon removal that will make a difference in climate change. He sees this purchase prize program as a way to start building the government’s capacity to play a larger role. “There’s going to need to be some sort of mandate or public procurement that happens for the field to really scale beyond 2030,” he said.
Avnos, Inc. — direct air capture — 3,000 credits
Carbon America — direct Air Capture — 3,400 credits
CarbonCapture, Inc. — direct air capture — 3,333 credits
Climeworks — direct air capture — 3,500 credits
Global Thermostat and Fervo Energy — direct air capture — 3,500 credits
Heirloom — direct air capture — 3,030 credits
1PointFive — direct air capture — 3,861 credits
280 Earth — direct air capture — 3,000 credits
8 Rivers — direct air capture — 7,200 credits
Arbor Energy — biomass with carbon removal and storage — 8,000 credits
Carbon Lockdown — biomass with carbon removal and storage — 17,143 credits
Charm Industrial — biomass with carbon removal and storage — 5,000 credits
Clean Energy Systems — biomass with carbon removal and storage — 11,320 credits
Climate Robotics — biochar — 30,252 credits
Graphyte—biomass with carbon removal and storage — 30,000 credits
Vaulted Deep —biomass with carbon removal and storage — 10,320 credits
Alkali Earth — enhanced rock weathering and mineralization — 8,108 credits
CREW Carbon — enhanced rock weathering and mineralization — 7,500 credits
Eion — enhanced rock weathering and mineralization — 9,900 credits
Lithos Carbon — enhanced rock weathering and mineralization — 8,109 credits
Mati Carbon — enhanced rock weathering and mineralization — 4,561 credits
Ebb Carbon— marine-based carbon removal — 3,000 credits
Equatic— marine-based carbon removal — 6,521 credits
Vycarb Inc.— marine-based carbon removal — 3,000 credits
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The agency provided a list to the Sierra Club, which in turn provided the list to Heatmap.
Officials at the Environmental Protection Agency remain closed-lipped about which grants they’ve canceled. Earlier this week, however, the office provided a written list to the Sierra Club in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, which begins to shed light on some of the agency’s actions.
The document shows 49 individual grants that were either “canceled” or prevented from being awarded from January 20 through March 7, which is the day the public information office conducted its search in response to the FOIA request. The grants’ total cumulative value is more than $230 million, although some $30 million appears to have already been paid out to recipients.
The numbers don’t quite line up with what the agency has said publicly. The EPA published three press releases between Trump’s inauguration and March 7, announcing that it had canceled a total of 42 grants and “saved” Americans roughly $227 million. In its first such announcement on February 14, the agency said it was canceling a $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, but the only grant to that organization on the FOIA spreadsheet is listed at $12 million. To make matters more confusing, there are only $185 million worth of EPA grant cuts listed on the Department of Government Efficiency’s website from the same time period. (Zeldin later announced more than 400 additional grant terminations on March 10.)
Nonetheless, the document gives a clearer picture of which grants Administrator Lee Zeldin has targeted. Nearly half of the canceled grants are related to environmental justice initiatives, which is not surprising, given the Trump administration’s directives to root out these types of programs. But nearly as many were funding research into lower-carbon construction materials and better product labeling to prevent greenwashing.
Here’s the full list of grants, by program:
A few more details and observations from this list:
In the original FOIA request, Sierra Club had asked for a lot more information, including communications between EPA and the grant recipients, and explanations for why the grants — which in many cases involved binding contracts between the government and recipients — were being terminated. In its response, EPA said it was still working on the rest of the request and expected to issue a complete response by April 12.
Defenders of the Inflation Reduction Act have hit on what they hope will be a persuasive argument for why it should stay.
With the fate of the Inflation Reduction Act and its tax credits for building and producing clean energy hanging in the balance, the law’s supporters have increasingly turned to dollars-and-cents arguments in favor of its preservation. Since the election, industry and research groups have put out a handful of reports making the broad argument that in addition to higher greenhouse gas emissions, taking away these tax credits would mean higher electricity bills.
The American Clean Power Association put out a report in December, authored by the consulting firm ICF, arguing that “energy tax credits will drive $1.9 trillion in growth, creating 13.7 million jobs and delivering 4x return on investment.”
The Solar Energy Industries Association followed that up last month with a letter citing an analysis by Aurora Energy Research, which found that undoing the tax credits for wind, solar, and storage would reduce clean energy deployment by 237 gigawatts through 2040 and cost nearly 100,000 jobs, all while raising bills by hundreds of dollars in Texas and New York. (Other groups, including the conservative environmental group ConservAmerica and the Clean Energy Buyers Association have commissioned similar research and come up with similar results.)
And just this week, Energy Innovation, a clean energy research group that had previously published widely cited research arguing that clean energy deployment was not linked to the run-up in retail electricity prices, published a report that found repealing the Inflation Reduction Act would “increase cumulative household energy costs by $32 billion” over the next decade, among other economic impacts.
The tax credits “make clean energy even more economic than it already is, particularly for developers,” explained Energy Innovation senior director Robbie Orvis. “When you add more of those technologies, you bring down the electricity cost significantly,” he said.
Historically, the price of fossil fuels like natural gas and coal have set the wholesale price for electricity. With renewables, however, the operating costs associated with procuring those fuels go away. The fewer of those you have, “the lower the price drops,” Orvis said. Without the tax credits to support the growth and deployment of renewables, the analysis found that annual energy costs per U.S. household would go up some $48 annually by 2030, and $68 by 2035.
These arguments come at a time when retail electricity prices in much of the country have grown substantially. Since December 2019, average retail electricity prices have risen from about $0.13 per kilowatt-hour to almost $0.18, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In Massachusetts and California, rates are over $0.30 a kilowatt-hour, according to the Energy Information Administration. As Energy Innovation researchers have pointed out, states with higher renewable penetration sometimes have higher rates, including California, but often do not, as in South Dakota, where 77% of its electricity comes from renewables.
Retail electricity prices are not solely determined by fuel costs Distribution costs for maintaining the whole electrical system are also a factor. In California, for example,it’s these costs that have driven a spike in rates, as utilities have had to harden their grids against wildfires. Across the whole country, utilities have had to ramp up capital investment in grid equipment as it’s aged, driving up distribution costs, a 2024 Energy Innovation report argued.
A similar analysis by Aurora Energy Research (the one cited by SEIA) that just looked at investment and production tax credits for wind, solar, and batteries found that if they were removed, electricity bills would increase hundreds of dollars per year on average, and by as much as $40 per month in New York and $29 per month in Texas.
One reason the bill impact could be so high, Aurora’s Martin Anderson told me, is that states with aggressive goals for decarbonizing the electricity sector would still have to procure clean energy in a world where its deployment would have gotten more expensive. New York is targetinga target for getting 70% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, while Minnesota has a goal for its utilities to sell 55% clean electricity by 2035 and could see its average cost increase by $22 a month. Some of these states may have to resort to purchasing renewable energy certificates to make up the difference as new generation projects in the state become less attractive.
Bills in Texas, on the other hand, would likely go up because wind and solar investment would slow down, meaning that Texans’ large-scale energy consumption would be increasingly met with fossil fuels (Texas has a Renewable Portfolio Standard that it has long since surpassed).
This emphasis from industry and advocacy groups on the dollars and cents of clean energy policy is hardly new — when the House of Representatives passed the (doomed) Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill in 2009, then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told the House, “Remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs.”
More recently, when Democratic Senators Martin Heinrich and Tim Kaine hosted a press conference to press their case for preserving the Inflation Reduction Act, the email that landed in reporters’ inboxes read “Heinrich, Kaine Host Press Conference on Trump’s War on Affordable, American-Made Energy.”
“Trump’s war on the Inflation Reduction Act will kill American jobs, raise costs on families, weaken our economic competitiveness, and erode American global energy dominance,” Heinrich told me in an emailed statement. “Trump should end his destructive crusade on affordable energy and start putting the interests of working people first.”
That the impacts and benefits of the IRA are spread between blue and red states speaks to the political calculation of clean energy proponents, hoping that a bill that subsidized solar panels in Texas, battery factories in Georgia, and battery storage in Southern California could bring about a bipartisan alliance to keep it alive. While Congressional Republicans will be scouring the budget for every last dollar to help fund an extension of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, a group of House Republicans have gone on the record in defense of the IRA’s tax credits.
“There's been so much research on the emissions impact of the IRA over the past few years, but there's been comparatively less research on the economic benefits and the household energy benefits,” Orvis said. “And I think that one thing that's become evident in the last year or so is that household energy costs — inflation, fossil fuel prices — those do seem to be more top of mind for Americans.”
Opinion modeling from Heatmap Pro shows that lower utility bills is the number one perceived benefit of renewables in much of the country. The only counties where it isn’t the number one perceived benefit are known for being extremely wealthy, extremely crunchy, or both: Boulder and Denver in Colorado; Multnomah (a.k.a. Portland) in Oregon; Arlington in Virginia; and Chittenden in Vermont.
On environmental justice grants, melting glaciers, and Amazon’s carbon credits
Current conditions: Severe thunderstorms are expected across the Mississippi Valley this weekend • Storm Martinho pushed Portugal’s wind power generation to “historic maximums” • It’s 62 degrees Fahrenheit, cloudy, and very quiet at Heathrow Airport outside London, where a large fire at an electricity substation forced the international travel hub to close.
President Trump invoked emergency powers Thursday to expand production of critical minerals and reduce the nation’s reliance on other countries. The executive order relies on the Defense Production Act, which “grants the president powers to ensure the nation’s defense by expanding and expediting the supply of materials and services from the domestic industrial base.”
Former President Biden invoked the act several times during his term, once to accelerate domestic clean energy production, and another time to boost mining and critical minerals for the nation’s large-capacity battery supply chain. Trump’s order calls for identifying “priority projects” for which permits can be expedited, and directs the Department of the Interior to prioritize mineral production and mining as the “primary land uses” of federal lands that are known to contain minerals.
Critical minerals are used in all kinds of clean tech, including solar panels, EV batteries, and wind turbines. Trump’s executive order doesn’t mention these technologies, but says “transportation, infrastructure, defense capabilities, and the next generation of technology rely upon a secure, predictable, and affordable supply of minerals.”
Anonymous current and former staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency have penned an open letter to the American people, slamming the Trump administration’s attacks on climate grants awarded to nonprofits under the Inflation Reduction Act’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund. The letter, published in Environmental Health News, focuses mostly on the grants that were supposed to go toward environmental justice programs, but have since been frozen under the current administration. For example, Climate United was awarded nearly $7 billion to finance clean energy projects in rural, Tribal, and low-income communities.
“It is a waste of taxpayer dollars for the U.S. government to cancel its agreements with grantees and contractors,” the letter states. “It is fraud for the U.S. government to delay payments for services already received. And it is an abuse of power for the Trump administration to block the IRA laws that were mandated by Congress.”
The lives of 2 billion people, or about a quarter of the human population, are threatened by melting glaciers due to climate change. That’s according to UNESCO’s new World Water Development Report, released to correspond with the UN’s first World Day for Glaciers. “As the world warms, glaciers are melting faster than ever, making the water cycle more unpredictable and extreme,” the report says. “And because of glacial retreat, floods, droughts, landslides, and sea-level rise are intensifying, with devastating consequences for people and nature.” Some key stats about the state of the world’s glaciers:
In case you missed it: Amazon has started selling “high-integrity science-based carbon credits” to its suppliers and business customers, as well as companies that have committed to being net-zero by 2040 in line with Amazon’s Climate Pledge, to help them offset their greenhouse gas emissions.
“The voluntary carbon market has been challenged with issues of transparency, credibility, and the availability of high-quality carbon credits, which has led to skepticism about nature and technological carbon removal as an effective tool to combat climate change,” said Kara Hurst, chief sustainability officer at Amazon. “However, the science is clear: We must halt and reverse deforestation and restore millions of miles of forests to slow the worst effects of climate change. We’re using our size and high vetting standards to help promote additional investments in nature, and we are excited to share this new opportunity with companies who are also committed to the difficult work of decarbonizing their operations.”
The Bureau of Land Management is close to approving the environmental review for a transmission line that would connect to BluEarth Renewables’ Lucky Star wind project, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports in The Fight. “This is a huge deal,” she says. “For the last two months it has seemed like nothing wind-related could be approved by the Trump administration. But that may be about to change.”
BLM sent local officials an email March 6 with a draft environmental assessment for the transmission line, which is required for the federal government to approve its right-of-way under the National Environmental Policy Act. According to the draft, the entirety of the wind project is sited on private property and “no longer will require access to BLM-administered land.”
The email suggests this draft environmental assessment may soon be available for public comment. BLM’s web page for the transmission line now states an approval granting right-of-way may come as soon as May. BLM last week did something similar with a transmission line that would go to a solar project proposed entirely on private lands. Holzman wonders: “Could private lands become the workaround du jour under Trump?”
Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, this week launched a pilot direct air capture unit capable of removing 12 tons of carbon dioxide per year. In 2023 alone, the company’s Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions totalled 72.6 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent.