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Money is pouring in — and deadlines are approaching fast.
There’s no quick fix for decarbonizing medium- and long-distance flights. Batteries are typically too heavy, and hydrogen fuel takes up too much space to offer a practical solution, leaving sustainable aviation fuels made from plants and other biomass, recycled carbon, or captured carbon as the primary options. Traditionally, this fuel is much more expensive — and the feedstocks for it much more scarce — than conventional petroleum-based jet fuel. But companies are now racing to overcome these barriers, as recent months have seen backers throw hundreds of millions behind a series of emergent, but promising solutions.
Today, most SAF is made of feedstocks such as used cooking oil and animal fats, from companies such as Neste and Montana Renewables. But this supply is limited by, well, the amount of cooking oil or fats restaurants and food processing facilities generate, and is thus projected to meet only about 10% of total SAF demand by 2050, according to a 2022 report by the Mission Possible Partnership. Beyond that, companies would have to start growing new crops just to make into fuel.
That creates an opportunity for developers of second-generation SAF technologies, which involve making jet fuel out of captured carbon or alternate biomass sources, such as forest waste. These methods are not yet mature enough to make a significant dent in 2030 targets, such as the EU's mandate to use 6% SAF and the U.S. government’s goal of producing 3 billion gallons of SAF per year domestically. But this tech will need to be a big part of the equation in order to meet the aviation sector’s overall goal of net zero emissions by 2050, as well as the EU’s sustainable fuels mandate, which increases to 20% by 2035 and 70% by 2050 for all flights originating in the bloc.
“That’s going to be a massive jump because currently, SAF uptake is about 0.2% of fuel,” Nicole Cerulli, a research associate for transportation and logistics at the market research firm Cleantech Group, told me. The head of the airline industry’s trade association, Willie Walsh, said in December at a media day event, "We’re not making as much progress as we’d hoped for, and we’re certainly not making as much progress as we need.” While global SAF production doubled to 1 million metric tons in 2024, that fell far below the trade group’s projection of 1.5 million metric tons, made at the end of 2023.
Producing SAF requires making hydrocarbons that mirror those used in traditional jet fuel. We know how to do that, but the processes required — electrolysis, gasification, and the series of chemical reactions known as Fischer-Tropsch synthesis — are energy intensive. So finding a way to power all of this sustainably while simultaneously scaling to meet demand is a challenging and expensive task.
Aamir Shams, a senior associate at the energy think tank RMI whose work focuses on driving demand for SAF, told me that while sustainable fuel is undeniably more expensive than traditional fuel, airlines and corporations have so far been willing to pay the premium. “We feel that the lag is happening because we just don’t have the fuel today,” Shams said. “Whatever fuel shows up, it just flies off the shelves.”
Twelve, a Washington-based SAF producer, thinks its e-fuels can help make a dent. The company is looking to produce jet fuel initially by recycling the CO2 emitted from the ethanol, pulp, and paper industries. In September, the company raised $645 million to complete the buildout of its inaugural SAF facility in Washington state, support the development of future plants, and pursue further R&D. The funding includes $400 million in project equity from the impact fund TPG Rise Climate, $200 million in Series C financing led by TPG, Capricorn Investment Group, and Pulse Fund, and $45 million in loans. The company has also previously partnered with the Air Force to explore producing fuel on demand in hard to reach areas.
Nicholas Flanders, Twelve’s CEO, told me that the company is starting with ethanol, pulp, and paper because the CO2 emissions from these facilities are relatively concentrated and thus cheaper to capture. And unlike, say, coal power plants, these industries aren’t going anywhere fast, making them a steady source of carbon. To turn the captured CO2 into sustainable fuel, the company needs just one more input — water. Renewable-powered electrolyzers then break apart the CO2 and H2O into their constituent parts, and the resulting carbon monoxide and hydrogen are combined to create a syngas. That then gets put through a chemical reaction known as “Fischer-Tropsch synthesis,” where the syngas reacts with catalysts to form hydrocarbons, which are then processed into sustainable jet fuel and ultimately blended with conventional fuel.
Twelve says its proprietary CO2 electrolyzer can break apart CO2 at much lower temperatures than would typically be required for this molecule, which simplifies the whole process, making it easier to ramp the electrolyzers up and down to match the output of intermittent renewables. (How does it do this? The company didn’t respond when I asked.) Twelve’s first plant, which sources carbon from a nearby ethanol facility, is set to come online next year, producing 50,000 gallons of SAF annually once it’s fully scaled, with electrolyzers that will run on hydropower.
While Europe may have stricter, actually enforceable SAF requirements than the U.S., Flanders told me there’s a lot of promise in domestic production. “I think the U.S. has an exciting combination of relatively low-cost green electricity, lots of biogenic CO2 sources, a lot of demand for the product we’re making, and then the inflation Reduction Act and state level incentives can further enhance the economics.” Currently, the IRA provides SAF producers with a baseline $1.25 tax credit per gallon produced, which gradually increases the greener the fuel gets. Of course, whether or not the next Congress will rescind this is anybody’s guess.
Down the line, incentives and mandates will end up mattering a whole lot. Making SAF simply costs a whole lot more than producing jet fuel the standard way, by refining crude oil. But in the meantime, Twelve is setting up cost-sharing partnerships between airlines that want to reduce their direct emissions (scope 1) and large corporations that want to reduce their indirect emissions (scope 3), which include employee business travel.
For example, Twelve has offtake agreements with Seattle-based Alaska Airlines and Microsoft for the fuel produced at its initial Washington plant. Microsoft, which aims to reduce emissions from its employees’ flights, will essentially cover the cost premium associated with Twelve’s more expensive SAF fuel, making it cost-effective for Alaska to use in its fleet. Twelve has a similar agreement with Boston Consulting Group and an unnamed airline
Eventually, Flanders told me, the company expects to source carbon via direct air capture, but doing so today would be prohibitively expensive. “If there were a customer who wanted to pay the additional amount to use DAC today, we'd be very happy to do that,” Flanders said. “But our perspective is it will maybe be another decade before that cost starts to converge.”
No sustainable fuel is even close to cost parity yet — Cerulli told me that it generally comes with a “roughly 250% to over 800%” cost premium over conventional jet fuel. So while voluntary uptake by companies such as Microsoft and BCG are helping drive the emergent market today, that won’t be near enough to decarbonize the industry. “At the simplest level, the cost of not using SAF has to be higher than using it,” Cerulli told me.
Pathway Energy thinks that by incorporating carbon sequestration into its process, it can help the world get there. The sustainable fuels company, which emerged from stealth just last month, is pursuing what CEO Steve Roberts told me is “probably the most cost-efficient long-term pathway from a decarbonization perspective.” The company is building a $2 billion SAF plant in Port Arthur, Texas designed to produce about 30 million gallons of jet fuel annually — enough to power about 5,000 carbon-neutral 10-hour flights — while also permanently sequestering more than 1.9 million tons of CO2.
Pathway, a subsidiary of the investment and advisory firm Nexus Holdings, has partnered with the UK-based renewable energy company Drax, which will supply the company with 1 million metric tons of wood pellets, to be turned into fuel using a series of well-established technologies. The first step is to gasify the biomass by heating the pellets to high temperatures in the absence of oxygen to produce a syngas. Then, just as Twelve does, it puts the syngas through the Fischer-Tropsch process to form the hydrocarbons that become SAF.
The competitive advantage here is capturing the emissions from the fuel production process itself and storing them permanently underground. Since Pathway is burying CO2 that’s already been captured by the trees from which the wood pellets come, that would make Pathway’s SAF carbon-negative, in theory, while the best Twelve and similar companies can hope for is carbon neutrality, assuming all of their captured carbon is used to produce fuel.
The choice of Drax as a feedstock partner is not without controversy, however, as the BBC revealed that the company sources much of its wood from rare old-growth forests. Though this is technically legal, it’s also ecologically disruptive. Roberts told me Drax’s sourcing methodologies have been verified by third parties, and Pathway isn’t concerned. “I don't think any of that controversy has yielded any actually significant changes to their sourcing program at all, because we believe that they're compliant,” Roberts told me. “We are 100% certain that they’re meeting all the standards and expectations.”
Pathway has big growth plans, which depend on the legitimacy of its sustainability cred. Beyond the Port Arthur facility, which Roberts told me will begin production by the end of 2029 or early 2030, the company has a pipeline of additional facilities along the Gulf Coast in the works. It also has global ambitions. “When you have a fuel that is this negative, it really opens up a global market, because you can transport fuel out of Texas, whether that be into the EU, Africa, Asia, wherever it may be,” Roberts said, explaining that even substantial transportation-related emissions would be offset by the carbon-negativity of the fuel.
But alternative feedstocks such as forestry biomass are finite resources, too. That’s why many experts think that within the SAF sector, e-fuels such as Twelve’s that could one day source carbon via direct air capture and then electrolyze it have the greatest potential for growth. “It’s extremely dependent on getting sustainable CO2 and cheap electricity prices so that you can make cheap green hydrogen,” Shams told me. “But theoretically, it is unlimited in terms of what your total cap on production would be.”
In the meantime, airlines are focused on making their planes and engines more aerodynamic and efficient so that they don’t consume as much fuel in the first place. They’re also exploring other technical pathways to decarbonization — because after all, SAF will only be a portion of the solution, as many short and medium-length flights could likely be powered by batteries or hydrogen fuel. RMI forecasts that by 2050, 45% of global emissions reduction in the aviation sector will come from improvements in fuel efficiency, 37% will be due to SAF deployment, 7% will come from hydrogen, and 3.5% will come from electrification.
If you did the mental math, you’ll notice these numbers add up to 92.5% — not 100%. “What we have done is, let's look at what we are actually doing today and for the past three, four, five years, and let's see if we get to net zero or not. And the answer is, no. We don't get to net zero by 2050,” Shams told me. And while getting to 92.5% is nothing to scoff at, that means that the aviation sector would still be emitting about 700 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent by that time.
So what’s to be done? “The financing sector needs to step up its game and take a little bit more of a risk than they are used to,” Shams told me, noting that one of RMI’s partners, the Mission Possible Partnership, estimates that getting the aviation sector to net zero will require an investment of around $170 billion per year, a total of about $4.5 trillion by 2050. These numbers take a variety of factors into account beyond strictly SAF production, such as airport infrastructure for new fuels, building out direct air capture plants, etc.
But any way you cut it, it’s a boatload of money that certainly puts Pathway’s $2 billion SAF facility and Twelve’s $645 million funding round in perspective. And it’s far from certain that we can get there. “Increasingly, that goal of the 2050 net-zero target looks really difficult to achieve,” Shams put it simply. “Commitments are always going up, but more can be done.”
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Secretary of Energy Chris Wright canceled 24 decarbonization grants worth $3.7 billion.
Secretary of Energy Chris Wright is clawing back 24 grants for projects to cut emissions from heavy industry after signaling earlier this month that he was reviewing the Biden administration’s award decisions. The total lost funding comes to just over $3.7 billion, and would have helped a wide range of companies, including those in food and beverage production, steelmaking, cement, and chemicals deploy cutting edge clean energy solutions.
The agency, however, decided that the projects “failed to advance the energy needs of the American people, were not economically viable and would not generate a positive return on investment of taxpayer dollars,” according to the announcement.
Most of the cancelled projects were part of the Industrial Demonstration Program, which was created by the Inflation Reduction Act and designed to help commercialize decarbonization solutions that were past the early experimental stage, but were also not quite ready for mass deployment.
Proponents of the program found the DOE’s decision outrageous. “They’re not building an economy — they’re dismantling it and giving away the future of manufacturing,” Evan Gillespie, a partner at the advocacy group Industrious Labs, said in a statement. Canceling these projects is “handing the competitive advantage to Europe, China, Canada, and other nations that are making significant investments in clean manufacturing while leaving the U.S behind,” he added.
The Kraft Heinz Food Company, for example, was supposed to get $172 million to swap out fossil fuel-fired boilers and other heating equipment for electric heat pumps and solar thermal systems at 10 of its factories. “This project seeks to help a major American brand achieve deep decarbonization and serve as an example for other U.S. food and beverage companies to reduce emissions from process heat while reducing energy costs,” the original award from the DOE said. Diageo, the liquor conglomerate, and Kohler, the kitchen and bathroom appliance brand, were also among the awardees.
Cement production is one of the biggest sources of industrial emissions in the world, and also among the most difficult to decarbonize due to an integral chemical reaction that releases carbon into the atmosphere regardless of whether the plant burns fossil fuels. Experts aren’t sure yet what the best solution will be, and the DOE program awarded a variety of projects to test different pathways.
Heidelberg Materials, one of the largest cement companies in the world, was going to get $500 million to demonstrate the first cement plant to capture and sequester its carbon emissions in the U.S. A company called Sublime Systems that’s using an alternative chemistry and electric currents to make cement was supposed to receive $87 million to build its first commercial-scale factory in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Just last week, Sublime signed a deal to supply 623,000 metric tons of zero-carbon cement to Microsoft, in part to support the tech giant’s data center buildout. Another company called Brimstone was awarded $189 million to produce low-carbon cement alongside alumina, the base material used to make aluminum.
“Given our project's strong alignment with President Trump's priority to increase U.S. production of critical minerals, we believe this was a misunderstanding,” a spokesperson for Brimstone told me. “Brimstone's Rock Refinery represents the only economically viable way to produce the critical mineral alumina in the U.S. from U.S.-mined rocks. As the first U.S.-based alumina plant in a generation, our project — which would also make Portland cement — would clear a 'mine-to-metal' path for U.S. aluminum production, fortifying the U.S. critical mineral supply chain and creating thousands of jobs.”
Sublime also shared a statement asserting that its technology would enable the Trump administration’s priorities. “We continue our bipartisan appeal to leaders who recognize that investing in American-invented breakthrough industrial technologies can address multiple policy priorities in tandem to the benefit of Americans from all walks of life,” Sublime said. The company added that it has “prepared for the possibility of this disappointing outcome” and is “evaluating various scenarios that leave our scale-up unimpeded.”
Oil and gas companies were also hit. A $332 million grant to help Exxon switch to green hydrogen at one of its refineries was canceled, as were $540 million in grants for the energy company Calpine to install carbon capture on its natural gas plants.
“It is hugely disappointing to see these projects canceled — projects that had already progressed through a rigorous, months-long review process by technical experts at DOE,” Jessie Stolark, the executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, said in a statement. While Wright said the terminations would generate taxpayer savings, Stolark argued they were depriving Americans of economic benefits. “Every dollar invested by the American taxpayer can lead to up to $4 in economic output through additional supply and material orders, job creation, and broader economic benefits to regional economies,” she wrote, citing a Department of Energy-authored analysis.
None of the awardees responded to my inquiry as to whether they would consider pursuing legal challenges. According to the law under which the program was created, the funding was to be awarded “on a competitive basis,” based on the expected greenhouse gas emission reductions from the project and its potential to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people. Additional criteria in the agency’s application process said it would evaluate projects based on the “degree to which the applicant assesses and demonstrates potential market competitiveness and sustainability for the proposed project, technology, and manufactured product(s) through market analysis and offtake agreements.”
Notably absent from the list of canceled projects is a grant for the steelmaking company Cleveland Cliffs. Earlier this month, I reported that the company was renegotiating its award under the Industrial Demonstration Program. On an earnings call, its CEO said it was abandoning plans to use clean energy and instead looking to use the funds to extend the life of its fossil fuel-fired blast furnace.
If gone unchallenged, the funding is not likely to be re-awarded to other projects. The budget bill that is currently working its way through Congress would rescind any money from the Industrial Demonstrations Program that isn’t under contract.
Especially with carbon capture tax incentives on the verge of disappearing, perhaps At One Ventures founder Tom Chi is onto something.
Technology to suck carbon dioxide out of the air — a.k.a. direct air capture — has always had boosters who say it’s necessary to reach net zero, and detractors who view it as an expensive fig leaf for the fossil fuel industry. But when the typical venture capitalist looks at the tech, all they see is dollar signs. Because while the carbon removal market is still in its early stages, if you look decades down the line, a technology that can permanently remove residual emissions in a highly measurable fashion has got to be worth a whole lot, right? Right?
Not so, says Tom Chi, founder of At One Ventures and co-founder of Google’s technological “moonshot factory,” X. Bucking the dominant attitude, he’s long vowed to stay away from DAC altogether. “If you’re trying to collect carbon dioxide in the air, it’s like trying to suck all the carbon dioxide through a tiny soda straw,” Chi told me. Given that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere sits at about 0.04%, “2,499 molecules out of 2,500 are not the one you’re trying to get,” Chi said. “These are deep, physical disadvantages to the approach.”
He’s obviously not the first to realize this. DAC companies and their scientists are well aware of the challenges they face. But investors are generally comfortable taking on risk across a host of different technologies and industries on the premise that at least a few of their portfolio companies will hit it big. As such, a nascent market and challenging physics are not inherent reasons to steer clear. DAC’s potential to secure cash-rich oil and gas industry buyers is pure upside.
Most prominent climate tech venture capital firms — including Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures, and Khosla Ventures — have at least one DAC company in their portfolios. At One Ventures itself has backed everything from producing oxygen on the moon (while also decarbonizing steel) to indoor solar cells and thorium-powered nuclear reactors, a hobbyhorse of techno-optimist nuclear bros and former presidential candidate Andrew Yang. So the fact that Chi won’t touch DAC is no small deal.
His hesitation stems from a matter of scale.To capture that 0.04% of atmospheric carbon, many DAC companies use giant fans to pull in large volumes of air from the atmosphere, which then pass through either a solid filter or a liquid solution that chemically captures the carbon dioxide. Although some companies are pursuing alternate approaches that rely on passive air contact rather than energy-intensive fans, either way, the amount of air that reaches any DAC machine’s so-called “collection aperture” is minuscule “relative to the scale of planet Earth,” Chi told me.
He views this as the core pitfall of the technology. “Half of the [operating expense] of the system is just trying to go after a technical disadvantage that you took on from day one,” Chi said. “By comparison, nature based restorations have enormous apertures,” Chi told me. “Think about the aperture of all the forests on the planet. Think about the aperture of all the soils on the planet, all the wetlands on the planet, the ocean.” His preferred methods of carbon removal are all nature-based. “In addition, their sequestration tends to be photosynthesis-powered, which means we’re not burning natural gas or using grid electricity in order to go make that thing work.”
Nature-based solutions often raise eyebrows in the carbon removal and reduction space, though, bringing to mind highly questionable carbon offsets such as those earned via “avoided deforestation.” The inherent counterfactual — would these trees really have been cut down if we didn’t buy these credits? — is difficult to measure with any certainty, and a 2023 investigation by The Guardian found that the majority of these types of credits are essentially bogus.
This same essential question around measurability plagues everything from afforestation and reforestation to soil carbon sequestration, biochar application, and wetland restoration. It’s extremely difficult to measure how much carbon is stored — and for how long — within complex, open ecosystems. On the other hand, engineered solutions such as direct air capture or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage are simple to quantify and promise permanent storage, making them attractive to large corporate buyers and easy to incentivize via mechanisms such as the federal carbon sequestration tax credit.
When I put all this to Chi, his response was simple. “It’s not an advantage to be able to measure something that can’t solve the problem,” he told me. For a moment, it seemed as if we had hit an intellectual dead end. For now, carbon removals and reductions are mainly driven by the voluntary carbon market, where prices are based on the exact tonnage of carbon removed. Reputable buyers don’t want to be burned again by investing in difficult to quantify offsets, and the current administration certainly doesn’t seem likely to step in with nature-based removal mandates or purchasing commitments anytime soon.
Chi’s answer to this conundrum is “financial enclosure,” essentially a fancy way of saying we need to monetize the value of nature-based systems. In many cases, he admitted, we don’t quite yet know how to do that, at least in a way that benefits the common good. “We figured out how to financially enclose a forest, clear cut it in order to go make board feed and paper and pulp,” he explained. But we don’t know how to financially enclose the benefit of preserving said forest, nor many other ecosystems such as wetlands that serve as highly effective carbon sinks.
At One Ventures has backed companies that work with a variety of buyers — from national governments to mining companies and farmers — that have a financial stake in (or are legally required to care about) ecosystem preservation and restoration. “Sometimes people break nature hard enough that it becomes that obvious. And then they have to go fix it,” Chi told me. “We’re going to invest in the companies that make it possible to go do that at incredibly low cost structures.”
One portfolio company, Dendra Systems, uses robots, drones, and other automated methods to do large scale ecosystem restoration, such as replanting mangroves in parts of the world such as Myanmar and Abu Dhabi where they’ve been cleared for property development or industrial use. The governments of both countries are paying Dendra to do this after realizing that removing mangroves had catastrophic consequences —- destroying subsistence fishing, wrecking erosion breaks — that would cost more to ameliorate than simply replanting the trees.
Then there’s Dalan Animal Health, which is developing vaccines for honeybees as hives become more vulnerable to disease. While not directly focused on carbon removal, the company has successfully “financially enclosed” pollination, as industrial farmers whose crops depend on pollinators will pay for the vaccine. This helps restore healthy ecosystems that can ultimately draw down more carbon. Chi told me that insurance companies have also shown a willingness to pay for nature-based solutions that can help lessen the impact of disasters such as floods or hurricanes.
While the carbon benefits of these companies are simply a bonus, the firm has invested in one pure play removal company, Gigablue. This startup releases engineered particles into the ocean that attract carbon-absorbing phytoplankton. As the particles accumulate more plankton, they sink to the ocean floor, where the carbon is then stored. Using onsite sampling and other advanced techniques, Chi told me that this tech is “very measurable” while also having an “aperture [that] is as wide as the ocean area that we’ve sprinkled things onto.”
Though Chi dislikes the illogical nature of the voluntary carbon market — he would much prefer a “polluter pays” system where money is directed towards nature-based sequestration — he knows that with the markets we have, precise measurability is paramount. So At One Ventures is throwing money at this, too. Portfolio company Chloris Geospatial combines satellite data and machine learning to measure biomass from space and track changes over time, helping legitimize forest-based removals. And Miraterra is focused on novel sensing tech and advanced modeling that allows farmers to calculate the amount of carbon in their soil.
But even if the carbon stored in natural ecosystems never becomes quite as measurable as engineered carbon removals, Chi thinks investors, companies, or governments should still be going all in. “When your volume is so much larger, then you can even throw big error bars around your measurability and still be miles ahead,” he told me.
Many investors say they want it all. You’ll see them funding nature-based and engineered carbon removal companies alike in an effort to take a “portfolio approach” to carbon removal. Chi, unsurprisingly, thinks that’s hogwash. “It’s weasel words to be like, it’s an important part of this portfolio,” he told me. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change also advocates for a diversified approach, without saying DAC itself is strictly necessary. DAC is “not going to do 1%, and it’s going to be massively more expensive than your other 99%,” Chi said. “At some point you’re going to be like, why is this in the portfolio?”
It’s certainly a more blunt assessment of the industry’s viability (or lack thereof) than I’ve heard any investor hazard before. But there may be more folks starting to come around to Chi’s perspective. With government support for DAC in question and the utility of carbon capture tax credits — which only benefit engineered removals — deeply threatened, venture funding for DAC is down over 60% from this time last year, Bloomberg reported.
Rajesh Swaminathan, a climate tech investor at Khosla Ventures told the publication that while many investors have taken bets on direct air capture, “Now, people are stepping back and saying, ‘Why didn’t I look at the economics there?’” Khosla itself is an investor in the DAC company Spiritus.
So what’s a longterm skeptic like Chi to do in this moment of doubt? As he told me, “I’m just going to keep on giving talks on it, and I know that physics is on my side.”
On the environmental reviews, Microsoft’s emissions, and solar on farmland
Current conditions: Enormous wildfires in Manitoba, Canada, will send smoke into the Midwestern U.S. and Great Plains this weekend • Northwest England is officially experiencing a drought after receiving its third lowest rainfall since 1871 • Thunderstorms are brewing in Washington, D.C., where the Federal Court of Appeals paused an earlier ruling throwing out much of Trump’s tariff agenda.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that courts should show more deference to agencies when hearing lawsuits over environmental reviews.
The case concerned a proposed 88-mile train line in Utah that would connect its Uinta Basin (and its oil resources) with the national rail network. Environmental groups and local governments claimed that the environmental impact statement submitted by the federal Surface Transportation Board did not pay enough attention to the effects of increased oil drilling and refining that the rail line could induce. The D.C. Circuit agreed, vacating the EIS; the Supreme Court did not, overturning the D.C. Circuit in an 8-0 decision.
The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, requires the federal government to study the environmental impact of its actions. The D.C. Circuit “failed to afford the Board the substantial judicial deference required in NEPA cases and incorrectly interpreted NEPA to require the Board to consider the environmental effects of upstream and downstream projects that are separate in time or place,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court.
The court’s decision could sharply limit the ability of the judicial branch to question environmental reviews by agencies under NEPA, and could pave the way for more certain and faster approvals for infrastructure projects.
At least, that’s what Kavanaugh hopes. The current NEPA process, he writes, foists “delay upon delay” on developers and agencies, so “fewer projects make it to the finish line. Indeed, fewer projects make it to the starting line.”
Map of the approved railway route.Source: Uinta Basin Railway Final Environmental Impact Statement
The Department of Agriculture is planning to retool a popular financing program, Rural Energy for America, to discourage solar development on agricultural land, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman exclusively reported.
“Farmland should be for agricultural production, not solar production,” a USDA spokesperson told Heatmap. The comments echoed a USDA report released last week criticizing the use of solar on agricultural land. The report said that the USDA will “disincentivize the use of federal funding at USDA for solar panels to be installed on productive farmland through prioritization points and regulatory action.” The USDA will also “call on state and local governments to work alongside USDA on local solutions.”
The daughter of a woman who died during the Pacific Northwest “Heat Dome” in 2021 sued seven oil and companies for wrongful death in Washington state court, The New York Times reported Thursday.
“The suit alleges that they failed to warn the public of the dangers of the planet-warming emissions produced by their products and that they funded decades-long campaigns to obscure the scientific consensus on global warming,” according to Times reporter David Gelles.
Several cities and states have brought suits making similar claims that oil and gas companies misled the public about the threat of climate change. Earlier this week, a German court threw out a suit from a Peruvian farmer against a German utility, which claimed that the utility’s commissions helped put his town at risk from glacial flooding.
The seven companies named in the lawsuit are Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, and Olympic Pipeline Company, a subsidiary managed by BP. None of them commented on the suit.
Tech giant Microsoft disclosed in its annual sustainability report that its carbon emissions have grown by 23.4% since 2020, even as the company has a goal to become “carbon negative” by 2030. The upside to the figures is that the growth in emissions was due to a much larger increase in energy use and business activity, not from using dirtier energy. In that same time period, Microsoft’s revenue has grown 71%, and its energy use has grown 168%.
“It has become clear that our journey towards being carbon negative is a marathon,” the report read. The company said it had contracted 34 gigawatts of non-emitting power generation and had agreements to procure 30 million metric tons of carbon removal.
The company has set out to reduce its indirect Scope 3 emissions “by more than half” by 2030 from the 11.5 million metric tons it reported in 2020, as its Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions fall to close to zero. It will become “carbon negative,” it hopes, by purchasing carbon removal.
Microsoft attempts to reduce emissions in its supply chain by procuring low- or no-carbon fuels and construction materials. Last week the tech giant signed a purchasing agreement with Sublime Systems for 600,000 tons of low-carbon cement.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it had approved a 77-megawatt small modular reactor design. This is the second SMR design approved by the NRC, following approval of a smaller design in 2020. Both are products of the SMR company NuScale, and neither has yet been deployed. A project to build the earlier design in Idaho was abandoned in 2023.
The NRC review was set to be completed in July of this year. Coming in ahead of scheduled demonstrates “the agency’s commitment to safely and efficiently enable new, advanced reactor technology,” the Commission said in a press release.
Congress and the Biden and Trump administrations have pushed the NRC to move faster and to encourage the development of small modular reactors. No SMR has been built in the United States, nor is there any current plan to do so that has been publicly disclosed. NuScale’s chief executive told Bloomberg that he hopes to have a deal signed by the end of the year and an operational plant by the end of the decade.
Tesla veteran Drew Baglino’s Heron Power raised a $38 million round of Series A funding for a new product designed to replace “legacy transformers and power converters by directly connecting rapidly growing megawatt-scale solar, batteries, and AI data centers to medium voltage transmission,” Baglino wrote on X.