Latest news with #USDepartmentoftheInterior
Time of India
3 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Japanese energy giant Jera to boost LNG imports from US
Tokyo: Japan's largest power generation company said on Thursday it would ramp up imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from the United States, as the government in Tokyo pushes for a trade deal with Washington. Jera said it had signed supply deals from four US gas projects in Texas and Louisiana under new 20-year contracts. The agreements "advance Jera's long-term strategy to build a diversified and resilient LNG procurement portfolio in support of stable, secure energy for Japan and Asia", it said. US President Donald Trump wants to expand his country's fuel production and exports, having pledged to "drill, baby, drill" for oil and gas during the election campaign. The deal comes as Japanese officials are locked in discussions with their US counterparts to dial down Trump's "Liberation Day" trade tariffs, with fuel and agriculture imports said to be one bargaining chip for Tokyo. Jera said its new agreements will allow it to procure up to 5.5 million extra tonnes of LNG per year from the United States. It currently imports 3.5-4 million tonnes. The US Department of the Interior hailed the agreements as "yet another major milestone for President Trump's commitment to increase investment in the US and unleash American dominance". "This commitment... will bring in almost a quarter trillion dollars to our nation's economy and support over 50,000 American jobs for our country's LNG industry," Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said in a statement. Jera currently produces about 30 percent of Japan's electricity, according to its website. Resource-poor Japan -- the world's fifth largest single-country emitter of carbon dioxide -- last year imported a total of 65.9 million tonnes of LNG. As of 2023, LNG imports from Australia accounted for 41.6 percent of all Japanese LNG imports, followed by Malaysia at 15.6 percent, Russia's 9.3 percent, and the United States' 8.4 percent, according to the trade ministry. In February, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba promised Trump that yearly Japanese investment would increase to $1 trillion.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US DOI to revise the offshore financial assurance rule
The US Department of the Interior has announced plans to revise the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's 2024 Risk Management and Financial Assurance for Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Lease and Grant Obligations Rule. The updated rule aims to align with the regulatory framework proposed by the Trump administration in 2020, significantly reducing costs and regulatory burdens for oil and gas producers in the Gulf of America. The revision intends to free up billions of dollars for American producers, enabling them to lease, explore, drill, and produce oil and gas while ensuring that American taxpayers are protected from high-risk decommission liabilities. This move reflects the Department's commitment to bolstering domestic energy production, safeguarding American jobs, and easing regulatory constraints on the oil and gas industry. Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said: 'This revision will enable our nation's energy producers to redirect their capital toward future leasing, exploration, and production all while financially protecting the American taxpayer. 'Cutting red tape will level the playing field and allow American companies to make investments that strengthen domestic energy security and benefit the Gulf of America states and their communities.' The previous rule, implemented under the Biden administration, was projected to heighten financial assurance requirements for offshore operators by an additional $6.9bn in bonding, with businesses incurring an extra $665m in premiums annually. This has restricted numerous companies in the Gulf of America from investing in energy development projects. Despite the proposed changes, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will maintain the requirement for all operators on the OCS to provide financial assurance for their decommissioning responsibilities. The Trump administration's stance ensures that the industry, rather than American taxpayers, remains accountable for stewardship as the Administration seeks a more balanced regulatory approach. The Department is expected to finalise the new rule in 2025 and will invite public commentary on the proposal. Additionally, last month, the Department has announced a policy update that could significantly boost offshore oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. This includes revised parameters from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement for Downhole Commingling in the Paleogene (Wilcox) reservoirs, increasing the allowable pressure differential from 200psi to 1,500psi. This decision is in line with President Donald Trump's Executive Order to unleash US energy and has been made following extensive industry consultation. "US DOI to revise the offshore financial assurance rule" was originally created and published by Offshore Technology, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Sign in to access your portfolio
WIRED
30-04-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Trump's Policies Are Creating Uncertainty for Fossil Fuel Companies
Apr 30, 2025 6:00 AM The Trump administration aims to make fossil fuels cheap—so cheap they wouldn't be worth extracting. ''Drill, baby, drill' is nothing short of a myth,' one oil executive has said. Photograph:Last week, the US Department of the Interior announced that it would speed up the approval process for certain fossil fuel projects, proclaiming that environmental analyses that previously would have taken years must now be taken down to, at maximum, a month. While the new procedures are seemingly a gift to the industry, this may actually be terrible news for pipeline developers, drillers, and miners. 'If I were a developer of any of these projects, I would look at this order and smack my forehead,' says Sam Sankar, a senior vice president at Earthjustice, the United States' biggest environmental nonprofit law organization. 'I don't want my project to be authorized pursuant to these laughable procedures. It won't hold up in court.' The new procedures use President Donald Trump's 'national energy emergency,' proclaimed in an executive order in the first week of his presidency, to shorten timelines for federal reviews, including environmental reviews and reviews attached to cultural landmarks. Reviews that take into account a project's impact on the environment are particularly truncated under this new policy. Processes that would normally take a year, the Department of the Interior says, must now be completed within just two weeks, while those reviews that might last longer than a year must now be done in under a month. Experts say, however, that the new timelines are so short that they almost certainly run afoul of the bedrock laws involved: the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. Mass ongoing layoffs inside the federal government—including at Interior, where The Washington Post reported that a quarter of the agency's staff may eventually be cut—means that there may soon be far too few staff to handle reviews that would be near impossible to fulfill even in normal circumstances. This leaves any projects that try to break ground under the new timelines open to very easy legal challenges—something that Sankar says is 'low-hanging fruit' for people who are impacted by a project and who want to take a developer to court. 'The people who wrote NEPA and the Endangered Species Act meant for the public to be involved, meant for real expertise to be applied, and meant for these to be meaningful ways to protect the environment and biodiversity,' Sankar says. 'To shorten these periods to where you can barely get a letter from point A to point B in that time means that they're not trying to comply at all. The good news is that it's all so manifestly illegal that virtually anything they do under these new legal procedures will be ripe for a legal challenge.' These fast-forwarded processes are tied to a part of NEPA that states that agencies can bypass environmental reviews in case of an emergency. Ryan Hathaway, who worked on NEPA-related issues within Interior for more than a decade, says that this emergency justification has been used in the past for concrete events that pose an immediate threat to health and public safety, like wildfires or floods, with specific actions that needed to be taken—rather than a vague and open-ended energy 'emergency.' 'Lawyers are going to have a field day with this,' says Hathaway, who now works as a director at Lawyers for Good Government, a legal nonprofit dedicated to progressive advocacy. It's clear these new rules are exclusively a gift to extractive industries like drilling and mining. Solar and wind projects—which the administration has repeatedly attacked, withdrawing leases for offshore wind and ordering a construction halt on projects already underway—are notably absent from the list of projects allowed to undergo accelerated timelines. But ironically, these orders are only contributing to an increasingly uncertain environment for fossil fuel producers under the new Trump administration. Even before the chaos caused by Liberation Day, Big Oil faced a potential reckoning with the president it helped elect. While the shale oil boom of the early 2010s rewarded executives for increased production, that strategy led to too much supply, leading prices per barrel to drop during the first Trump administration. After prices bottomed out during the pandemic, investors became more careful about unrestrained production. 'It's not government regulation that's limiting the production growth rate in the United States. It's Wall Street,' says Clayton Seigle, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank based in Washington, DC. The industry was given a boost in the early 2020s with the worldwide energy crisis caused by Russia's invasion of Ukraine, but investors kept a cautious eye on prices. Despite President Joe Biden's climate focus, the US oil and gas industry became the world's biggest crude oil producer in 2023, and reached a record high of producing 13.4 million barrels per day late last year. The challenge under the Trump administration would become balancing profitability with the president's goal of unleashing 'energy dominance.' Trump, after all, has stated that he wants oil to drop to $50 a barrel—a price far too low to be profitable for the industry. Each quarter, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas publishes a regional report on the state of the oil and gas industry in Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, which includes anonymous survey responses from executives. The vitriol towards the White House in these comments from the first survey of this year, published in late March, shocked analysts. 'The key word to describe 2025 so far is 'uncertainty' and as a public company, our investors hate uncertainty,' one anonymous executive said. 'This uncertainty is being caused by the conflicting messages coming from the new administration. There cannot be 'US energy dominance' and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory.' "'Drill, baby, drill' is nothing short of a myth and populist rallying cry,' another wrote. Trump has continued to hand out questionable gifts to industry. On Thursday, Interior announced that it had changed some policies around offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico that could, according to the agency, increase production in the Gulf by up to 100,000 barrels a day. Meanwhile, Interior is also reportedly assembling a list of fossil fuel deposits on public lands that it plans to open up for production. Like the accelerated timelines for environmental permitting, these gifts come with significant strings attached. While the Gulf order will help companies currently producing to up their productivity, they're unlikely to lure new customers to the region: Offshore drilling is expensive, and four-fifths of the more than 2,000 active leases in the Gulf are sitting unused. And while opening up public lands to drilling may sound like an industry wish-list item, companies faced with an uncertain American regulatory environment—from the looming threat of tariffs, to accelerated permitting timelines that could get projects held up in court, to promises made under a Republican administration that may be withdrawn the next time a Democrat is president—may not want to invest years and capital in starting up a project in a risky area. 'For more than a century, energy companies have looked at projects in part based on the host country's political risk, but the United States wasn't on that list,' Seigle says. 'These days we see huge swings in political support for oil and gas, and the trend of reversing the prior administration's approach. So energy companies and their investors are now thinking about the political risk of energy projects right here at home.'
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
US DOI updates policy to boost offshore oil production
The US Department of the Interior (DOI) has announced a policy update that could significantly increase offshore oil production in the Gulf of Mexico. The update includes revised parameters from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) for Downhole Commingling in the Paleogene (Wilcox) reservoirs, expanding the allowable pressure differential from 200psi to 1,500psi. This move aligns with President Donald Trump's Executive Order to unleash US energy and follows extensive industry consultation. This change could potentially boost production output by approximately 10%, which translates to an increase of more than 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) over the next ten years. Further gains could be realised as operators provide additional data. BSEE principal deputy director Kenneth C. Stevens said: 'This is a major win for domestic energy. Thanks to the tireless work of our technical experts and our industry partners, this advancement enables increased recovery from existing wells, reducing the cost per barrel and strengthening our nation's energy independence.' A study from the University of Texas on commingling has shown that this method of production significantly increases oil recovery. Compared with sequential production schemes, commingled production yields 61% more oil over 30 years and 21% more over 50 years. The policy shift is based on modern reservoir performance analysis and supersedes outdated guidance from a 2010 government study. Under the new rules, operators are now permitted to safely produce from multiple reservoirs with greater pressure differences, subject to new conditions including fluid compatibility certification, pressure monitoring and regular performance reporting to the BSEE. This policy change aims to increase production and promote resource conservation by accelerating development from each reservoir. It helps prevent waste and maximises the value extracted from every well. The revised strategy aims for long-term price stability and energy affordability for US households by increasing oil production from existing operations, without the need for additional infrastructure or leases. Last month, the Interior Department announced that the US will no longer mandate environmental impact statements for roughly 3,244 oil and gas leases in the western states. This action seeks to lower regulatory obstacles and accelerate domestic energy development. "US DOI updates policy to boost offshore oil production" was originally created and published by Offshore Technology, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Sign in to access your portfolio
Saudi Gazette
21-03-2025
- Business
- Saudi Gazette
Trump uses emergency powers to boost mineral production
WASHINGTON — US President Donald Trump has invoked emergency powers to expand domestic production of critical minerals as he tries to reduce US reliance on imports from countries like China. The executive order, which uses cold war era legislation, instructs government agencies, including the defense department, to prioritise mining projects as well as providing technical and financial support to boost critical mineral production. It comes as a trade war escalates with China, which has overwhelming control over the supply chain of some critical minerals. Last year, Beijing banned the sale of some critical minerals to the US, forcing American firms to look for other sources of the vital materials. "Our national and economic security are now acutely threatened by our reliance upon hostile foreign powers' mineral production," the executive order said. "It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent." The order also calls for the speeding up of permits for mining and processing projects as well as instructing the US Department of the Interior to prioritise mineral production on federal land. Despite having some critical mineral deposits, the US relies heavily on other countries for its supplies. Trump's tariffs on a wide range of imports have sparked trade tensions with some of its main suppliers like China and Canada. Critical minerals are vital to the production of key technologies ranging from batteries to advanced weapons systems. Trump has also been eager to gain access to Ukraine's critical minerals. He said on Thursday that a deal will be signed "very shortly". "We're also signing agreements in various locations to unlock rare earths and minerals and lots of other things all over the world, but in particular Ukraine". Aside from Ukraine, the US is negotiating a potential deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo over its mineral resources. President Trump has also talked about taking over the semi-autonomous Danish territory of Greenland, which is rich on rare earths. — BBC
