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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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Reading between the lines of Governor Kathy Hochul’s big nuclear announcement.
With New York City temperatures reaching well into the 90s, the state grid running on almost two-thirds fossil fuels, and the man who was instrumental in shutting down one of the state’s largest sources of carbon-free power vying for a political comeback on Tuesday, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Monday that she wants to bring new, public nuclear power back to the state.
Specifically, Hochul directed the New York Power Authority, the state power agency, to develop at least 1 gigawatt of new nuclear capacity upstate. While the New York City region hasn’t had a nuclear power plant since then-Governor Andrew Cuomo shut down Indian Point in 2021, there are three nuclear power plants currently operating closer to the 49th Parallel: Ginna, FitzPatrick, and Nine Mile Point, which together have almost 3.5 gigawatts of capacity and provide about a fifth of the state’s electric power,according to the nuclear advocacy group Nuclear New York. All three are now owned and operated by Constellation Energy, though FitzPatrick was previously owned by NYPA.
Hochul’s announcement did not specify a design or even a location for the new plant, but there were some hints. The press release describes “at least one new nuclear energy facility with no less than one gigawatt of electricity.” While 1 gigawatt is the capacity of a Westinghouse AP1000, the large, light-water reactor built at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, the explanation seems to leave room for the possibility of multiple, smaller plants.
Then there was where Hochul chose to make the announcement, in front of the monumental Robert Moses Niagara Power Plant, which, when it was built in 1961, was the largest hydropower plant in the western hemisphere. The release includes an intriguing reference to the country just on the other side of the river, saying that the plan “will allow for future collaboration with other states and Ontario, building on regional momentum to strengthen nuclear supply chains, share best practices, and support the responsible deployment of advanced nuclear technologies.”
To me at least, all this points to the possibility that we could actually be talking about a small modular reactor, specifically GE Hitachi’s BWRX-300, one of a handful of SMR designs vying for both regulatory approval and commercial viability in the U.S. Canada’s Ontario Power Generation recently approved a plan to build one, with the idea to eventually build three more for a total 1.2 gigawatts of generating capacity, i.e. roughly the amount Hochul’s targeting. The Tennessee Valley Authority, America’s largest public power provider, is also looking at building a BWRX-300. Whichever is completed first will become the first operating SMR in North America. (A NYPA spokesperson told me there has been “no determination on technology yet,” nor on location.)
There are a few policy conclusions we can draw from the announcement, as well, one being that Hochul has determined New York’s energy needs do not match up with its current, renewables-heavy energy roadmap set out more than five years ago. The 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (signed by Cuomo) set out a goal for New York to supply 70% of its electricity with renewables by 2030; about a year ago, the Hochul administration said that it would likely not meet that target, which has only slipped farther from view under the Trump administration’s assault on the offshore wind industry, which was supposed to anchor the state’s renewables supply — especially near New York City, where land is scarce but shoreline is plentiful.
The new nuclear plan also has a distinctively upstate appeal, which is not surprising considering Hochul’s Buffalo roots. (She said during the announcement that she had visited the Niagara plant, which is just outside Buffalo, “so many times.”) The upstate power grid is less carbon intensive than the downstate grid and is due to receive much of the wind and solar development necessary to meet New York’s climate goals. But the northern reaches of the state are also more politically conservative and more rural, making it both an inviting target for renewables development and a potential wellspring of opposition.
“The fundamental challenge of wind, solar, and storage across upstate is that it’s subject to a lot of local opposition,” Ben Furnas, who served as director of the Mayor’s Office of Climate and Sustainability in New York City, told me. “Something that’s remarkable about nuclear power is that the land footprint is more modest.” (The NYPA spokesperson said that NYPA’s own plans for renewable development were not being altered.)
Nuclear power plants can also be economic lifelines — especially in rural areas — due to the permanent, high-paying jobs they support and direct economic benefits to the surrounding communities.
“There’s a lot of real win-win deals to be struck,” Furnas said. “It’s not an unknown, radical, alien notion. Plenty of people work in those plants and live near them. It’s a very different politics than what was happening in Hudson Valley around Indian Point,” where environmental groups like Riverkeeper (long associated with former Cuomo associate and current Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.), had worked for years to shut down the plant.
Monday’s nuclear announcement included supportive quotes not just from the usual suspects of state energy and environmental officials and union leaders, but also from the chief executive of Micron, which is set to start working on a semiconductor fabrication facility in the central part of the state. “A critical factor in the success of the semiconductor ecosystem is access to affordable, reliable energy. We commend New York State for advancing an all-of-the-above energy strategy — including nuclear power,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.
“To power this one facility, Micron is going to need so much power — so much incredible power — and there’s only one commercially viable option that can deliver that much clean, renewable, reliable power, and that’s what’s been operating in New York for decades: nuclear energy,” Hochul said Monday. “Harnessing the power of the atom is the best way to generate steady zero-emission electricity, and to help this transition.”
The mainstream environmental groups that supported the renewables-focused 2019 law (many of which either oppose nuclear power or are at best neutral towards it) were nowhere to be found during today’s announcement, however, and the plan has already drawn skepticism from some progressives.
Liz Krueger, a Manhattan Democrat who chairs the New York state senate’s finance committee, said in a statement that she had “significant concerns” about the nuclear plan, including its cost effectiveness, how to dispose of nuclear waste, the time required to site and build the project, whether other renewable options could fill the gap instead, and whether it has the “full informed consent from impacted communities.”
“I have yet to see any real-world examples of new nuclear development” that have met all these concerns, Krueger said. New York has a checkered history of nuclear development: Long Island ratepayers spent decadespaying for the completed but never operational Shoreham nuclear plant, whose costs ballooned by billions of dollars as construction dragged on from 1973 to 1984.
But the announcement comes at a time when the federal regulatory and tax balance is tipping toward nuclear regardless. The Trump administration issued a fleet of executive orders looking to speed up nuclear construction and regulatory approvals, and Senate Republicans’ version of the mega budget reconciliation bill includes far more generous treatment of nuclear development compared to wind and solar.
Public Power NY, an advocacy group that supports renewables development by NYPA, expressed skepticism about the nuclear plan in spite of these supportive signs.
“Hochul’s decision to step in based on promises from Donald Trump shows just how unserious she is about New Yorker’s energy bills and climate future. NYPA should be laser focused on rapidly scaling up their buildout of affordable solar and wind which is the only way to meet the state’s science-based climate goals and lower energy bills,” the group said in a statement.
For his part, Furnas was more pragmatic. “It’s really good that Governor Hochul is putting everything on the table when it comes to ensuring reliable generation for New York State and to meet clean air and carbon emission goals,” he said. “It would be foolish and unfortunate to not look at everything she can.”
Hochul herself appears determined to push through.
During the announcement, referring to the buzzing power plant behind her, Hochul said that “belief in sometimes impossible ideas” can bring people together. The power plant currently standing on that site was built in less than three years after an earlier plant on the Niagara collapsed. New nuclear power in New York may have seemed impossible, but it might still happen.
Even as Iran retaliated against U.S. airstrikes, prices have stayed calm.
Oil prices have stayed stable so far following the U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities over the weekend, and President Donald Trump wants to keep it that way.
In two consecutive posts on Truth Social Monday morning, the president wrote “To The Department of Energy: DRILL, BABY, DRILL!!! And I mean NOW!!!” and “EVERYONE, KEEP OIL PRICES DOWN. I’M WATCHING! YOU’RE PLAYING RIGHT INTO THE HANDS OF THE ENEMY. DON’T DO IT!”
While Iran, of course, does not yet have an actual nuclear weapon, it does have a kind of “nuclear option” to retaliate: closing off the Strait of Hormuz, which separates the oil-rich countries like Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Iraq (and Iran’s own largest ports) from the Indian Ocean, and by extension all of global shipping. Iran’s parliament approved closing off the strait, but any real effort to do so would have to come from Iran’s most senior leadership, which has not so far seemed inclined to torpedo its own economy.
Markets, at least so far, do not see much more risk today than they did before the U.S. airstrikes. West Texas Intermediate oil price benchmark sat at just over $74 a barrel Monday morning, up substantially from its low of just over $57 in early May, but up only mildly from its $68 a barrel level on June 12, the day before Israel began bombing Iran. Prices are basically flat since Friday, even after Iran said it had launched a strike on an American base in Qatar.
“Multiple oil tankers crossing the Strait of Hormuz this morning, both in and outbound,” Bloomberg’s Javier Blas wrote on X Monday morning. “No[t] even a hint of disruption. Oil loading across multiple ports in the Persian Gulf appears normal. If anything, export rates over the last week are higher than earlier in June.”
As Greg Brew, an analyst at the Eurasia Group, told me, “The Hormuz risk is generally overstated. The Iranian threats are mostly rhetoric and meant for domestic political consumption. Hardliners in particular will use threats to close the strait as a means of letting off steam following the U.S. bombing of Fordow.”
“In reality,” he went on, “Iran faces a massive disparity in forces in the Gulf. A move to close Hormuz would be near suicidal as it would expand the scope of the war, drag in the Gulf states as well as the U.S., and imperil Iran’'s own energy exports at a time when the regime will need every financial and economic lifeline it can get.”
Inasmuch as oil prices have moved in the past few weeks, it’s been in response to the perceived increased risk of some kind of cataclysm to the world oil trade — even if the actual chances of the strait being entirely closed to tanker traffic remains low.
“Prices remain elevated on account of the regional risk, and are likely to remain in the $70s or low $80s until we see a pathway toward broader de-escalation,” Brew said.
For the American oil industry, however, a more nervous market might be a more profitable one.
Aniket Shah, an analyst at Jefferies, wrote a note to clients over the weekend attributing the increase since May to “rising tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, which channels ~20% of global oil shipments.”
“While the US imports less Middle Eastern oil than in past decades, global price shocks still drive up domestic fuel and transport costs,” he wrote.
In the months running up to the recent oil price increase, American drillers were facing an unpleasant combination of tariffs, increased production overseas (encouraged by Trump), and low prices at home, which wrecked their capital planning. Some domestic oil and gas drillers like Matador in April and Diamondback in May told their investors they planned to decrease their planned capital expenditures; over the past two months, drillers have been slowly but steadily taking rigs offline, according to the widely watched Baker Hughes rig count.
Conflict in the Middle East could therefore provide some relief (at least for the oil and gas industry) at home. “U.S. producers are among the winners here,” Brew told me. “A few months of higher prices will offer a nice hedge for shale drillers and ease their plans to reduce expenditure and output for the year.”
But higher profits for oil drillers will not necessarily translate into increased production, as Trump has commanded. “Since this is all based on risk premium and does not reflect a change in fundamentals, shale drillers are likely to deliver the gains to shareholders rather than pumping the money back into production,” Brew explained. “An overall drop in U.S. onshore output in 2025 is probably still in the cards.”
In that scenario, oil company profits would rise while production would fall year-over-year. And that would likely mean an even more infuriated Trump, who has also recently reignited his campaign to push Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates, citing several months of low inflation.
“Elevated oil prices risk stalling recent disinflation trends and complicates the Fed’s path to rate cuts,” Shah wrote.
Even if the strait remains open, if oil prices don’t fall, expect more Truths.
On record-breaking temperatures, oil prices, and Tesla Robotaxis
Current conditions: Wildfires are raging on the Greek island of Chios • Forecasters are monitoring a low-pressure system in the Atlantic that could become a tropical storm sometime today • Residents in eastern North Dakota are cleaning up after tornadoes ripped through the area over the weekend, killing at least three people.
A dangerous heat wave moves from the Midwest toward the East Coast this week, and is expected to challenge long-standing heat records. In many places, temperatures could hit 100 degrees Fahrenheit and feel even warmer when humidity is factored in. “High overnight temperatures will create a lack of overnight cooling, significantly increasing the danger,” according to the National Weather Service. Extreme heat warnings and advisories are in effect from Maine through the Carolinas, across the Ohio Valley and down into southern states like Mississippi and Louisiana. “It’s basically everywhere east of the Rockies,” National Weather Service meteorologist Mark Gehring told The Associated Press. “That is unusual, to have this massive area of high dew points and heat.”
AccuWeather
Regional grid operator PJM Interconnection, which covers 13 states, issued an energy emergency alert for today. The alert urges power transmission and generation owners to delay any planned maintenance so that no grid sources are out of commission as temperatures soar. A heat wave of this nature is rare this early in the summer. The last time temperatures hit 100 degrees in June in New York City, for example, was in 1995, according to AccuWeather. Heat waves are becoming more frequent and more intense as the climate warms. Here’s a look at how these events have changed over the past 60 years or so:
Oil markets are jittery this morning after Iran’s parliament endorsed a measure to block the Strait of Hormuz in response to U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. About 20% of the world’s oil and liquified natural gas shipments travel through the shipping route, and as The Wall Street Journalexplains, the supplies “dictate prices paid by U.S. drivers and air travelers.” Oil prices rose to five-month highs this morning on the news. Tehran has long threatened to close the strait, but such a move is seen as unlikely because it would disrupt Iran’s own energy exports, which are its “sole global energy revenue stream,” one analyst told the Journal.
A handful of climate-related provisions in the GOP’s reconciliation bill are in limbo after the Senate parliamentarian advised that the policies violated the “Byrd Rule,” i.e. were deemed extraneous to budgetary matters, and thus were subject to a 60-vote threshold instead of the simple majority allowed for reconciliation. The provisions include:
The Senate Finance Committee is set to meet with the parliamentarian today.
In case you missed it: The Supreme Court on Friday gave the green light for fuel producers to challenge a Clean Air Act waiver issued by the EPA that lets California set tougher vehicle emissions standards than those at the federal level. A lower court rejected the lawsuit from Diamond Alternative Energy and other challengers last year, but as Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the majority, California’s ambitious Zero-Emission Vehicle Program is hurting fuel producers, so they have standing to sue. The vote was 7 to 2, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.
As Heatmap’s Katie Brigham has explained, if the EPA waiver is eliminated, Tesla could take a big financial hit. That’s because the zero-emissions vehicle program lets automakers earn credits based on the number and type of ZEVs they produce, and since Tesla is a pure-play EV company, it has always generated more credits than it needs. “The sale of all regulatory credits combined earned the company a total of $595 million in the first quarter [of 2025] on a net income of just $409 million,” Brigham reported. “That is, they represented its entire margin of profitability. On the whole, credits represented 38% of Tesla’s net income last year.”
Tesla launched its Robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, over the weekend. A small number of rides were doled out to hand-picked influencers and retail investors, and a Tesla employee sat in the front passenger seat of each autonomous Model Y to monitor safety. The rollout was “uncharacteristically low-key,” Bloombergreported, but CEO Elon Musk said the company is being “super paranoid about safety.” San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Antonio are rumored to be the next cities slated for Robotaxi service. “Tesla is still behind Waymo, by several years,” wrote Jameson Dow at Electrek. “But Waymo has also not been scaling particularly quickly, and certainly both are slower than a lot of techno-optimists would have liked. So we’ll have to see which tortoise wins this race.” The stakes are pretty high: Investment management firm ARK Invest projected that Robotaxis could bring in $951 billion for Tesla by 2029 and make up 90% of the company’s earnings.
A new report from energy think tank Ember concludes that in the world’s sunniest cities, it’s now possible (and economically viable) to get at least 90% of the way to constant solar electricity output for every hour of the day, 365 days a year.