Urenco plans to expand uranium enrichment capacity at its U.S. facility in New Mexico by nearly 50 percent, adding 2.1 million separative work units (SWU) to support rising domestic demand for nuclear fuel.
The multi-billion-dollar project will install 24 cascades of gas centrifuges at the National Enrichment Facility in Eunice. The first cascades are scheduled to enter production in 2032, with the remaining units installed through 2036.
Solar energy and batteries are making it easier for utilities to meet surging electricity demand during extreme heat, but prolonged high temperatures are exposing other vulnerabilities in the grid.
Electricity demand rises as air conditioners work harder in extreme heat, while high temperatures can make parts of the system less efficient and put additional stress on equipment. Climate change is extending periods of extreme heat just as electrification and data centers add new loads, leaving parts of the grid working harder for longer.
This article was initially published in The Hill.
The price of oil has been yo-yo-ing dramatically since the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran in early 2026 and Iran’s subsequent military control of the Strait of Hormuz. Rather than causing disparate groups to come together to recognize the importance of all forms of energy, this has resulted in some pushing harder for oil and gas and others pressing harder for solar, wind and batteries.
This is a false dichotomy. Both are needed.
>>>READ: America’s Permitting System Is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It
A similar situation exists with China — conceptually the Strait of Beijing — which dominates the global refining of critical minerals and related supply chains needed to produce the world’s solar panels. It also manufactures a large share of lithium-ion batteries. The reality is that aggregate U.S. shale production is plateauing — and what follows this “transition” from oil and gas production growth matters.
The shale revolution was one of the greatest technological achievements in American energy history. Through innovation in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, the U.S. reversed a decades long production decline and now leads the world in oil and gas production. Affordable shale oil and gas helped pull the U.S. out of the 2009 global recession, improved its geopolitical position, and even lowered carbon emissions as natural gas displaced coal in electricity generation.
But geology has the final word. Every shale basin matures and production eventually slows. To extend the life of shale will require bipartisan policy and regulatory reforms, not uninformed, political sound bites. Investment in advanced drilling technologies, digital optimization and enhanced recovery techniques can help.
Permitting reform is also needed, for all sources of energy. Lengthy permitting delays increase costs, discourage investment and slow construction of critical infrastructure. Improved permitting means clearer rules, greater regulatory certainty and an environment that is better cared for.
Subscribe for ideas that support the environment and the people.
But even with extended shale production, what comes next?
Some promote a full-scale “transition” from fossil fuels to solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric vehicles. Solar and wind are valuable supplemental technologies in the right settings. But it’s tough to negotiate with physics. Solar, wind and batteries require enormous amounts of land to deploy and back up generation and storage, adding complexity and cost.
Further, they need vast quantities of critical metals and rare earth elements, which must be transported, processed and made into solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and EVs, all dominantly sourced from China. If the U.S. tries to replace shale oil and gas with technologies that are dependent on Chinese-controlled mineral processing and manufacturing, the outcome unavoidably means far greater dependencies on China.
Good for China. Bad for America. And bad for Europe, which continues to increase its dependence on batteries to back up intermittent solar and wind and power EVs.
The backbone of the global energy system must remain affordable, reliable and secure. In terms of electricity, which represents about 20 percent of global end-use energy, natural gas is uniquely positioned to provide flexible, lower-emission electricity while supporting industrial growth and grid reliability.
Advanced nuclear energy offers carbon-free, around-the-clock electricity with extraordinary energy density, a remarkably small land footprint, and is highly affordable once the plant is built. Next-generation enhanced geothermal systems hold potential for low emissions, baseload electricity. These technologies are not competitors to solar and wind. They are teammates.
>>> READ: House Acts to Unlock America’s Geothermal Potential
America must pursue an energy strategy that embraces innovation rather than ideology. It should extend oil and natural gas responsibly while investing aggressively in advanced nuclear, geothermal and grid modernization. At the same time, it must rebuild domestic mining, mineral processing and advanced manufacturing so that it is not dependent on geopolitical competitors.
Energy security has never been about choosing one fuel over another. It is about ensuring that America can compete across the entire energy system. If China controls the materials, processing and manufacturing behind tomorrow’s technologies, the U.S. risks surrendering the security advantage that innovation worked so hard to create.
A China-dominated energy future is not inevitable. But avoiding it will require bipartisan recognition of physics and economic realities, and the same combination of innovation, science, engineering, investment and pragmatic policy that made the shale revolution possible in the first place.
Shale bought America valuable time. Let’s use it wisely.
Scott Tinker is professor emeritus at the University of Texas-Austin. He hosts “Energy Switch” on PBS nationwide, and “Earth Date” on public radio weekly in all 50 states.
C3 Solutions recently co-hosted a roundtable on critical minerals policy, bringing together representatives from government, the policy world, and industry to work through a question that is becoming more urgent in Washington: how the United States can secure the mineral and rare earth supply chains needed for its energy, computing, and defense sectors. Held under Chatham House rules, the conversation covered the policy solutions needed to bring new domestic production online, build robust allied partnerships, and foster innovation to improve supply chain reliability. A few takeaways stood out because they show that the problem is largely one of our own making.
>>>READ: Federal Critical Minerals Investments Need a Cost-Benefit Test
Permitting is the clearest example. Participants noted that the timeline for discovery-to-extraction of minerals in the U.S. averages roughly 29 years, compared to about five in peer jurisdictions like Canada and Australia. That gap isn’t based on differences in our resources or available capital; it results from differences in how mining is regulated and is compounded by open-ended litigation exposure that undermines the economics of mining and refining projects and scares off investors. Participants also agreed that a durable legislative fix will matter more than speedy but volatile executive solutions. Executive actions can accelerate existing and proposed projects, but because the next administration can reverse them, they leave developers exposed to political volatility that predictable rules would not.
The need for durable solutions, especially to self-imposed constraints, resurfaced in discussions of international cooperation and removing obstacles to innovation. Secure supply chains will depend on partnerships with allies, and those work best when treated as genuine two-way relationships between nations with differing objectives. Washington should view critical minerals policy as a place to find compromise with friendly nations rather than as an extension of domestic policy. For instance, accepting that some defense-related demand may need to be opened to trusted partners like Australia and the United Kingdom rather than reserved for domestic projects alone. On innovation, participants identified the central difficulty as commercialization, not scientific breakthroughs. Funding research into new technologies does not, by itself, mean those technologies can meet the cost, purity, and throughput thresholds needed to be competitive.
Subscribe for ideas that support the environment and the people.
The key lesson is that policymakers must first remove self-imposed constraints. That lesson needs to guide how Washington approaches the critical minerals problem. Before instituting sweeping policies that risk creating costs and distortions worse than the supply disruptions and Chinese dependence they aim to solve, Washington needs to weigh the benefits of intervention against its costs.
As the roundtable illustrated, permitting reform leads the list. Without it, new domestic mining or refining may not get built even with heavy government support. Removing trade barriers ranks just as high. Tariffs on friendly nations, especially Canada and Japan, raise the cost of the most realistic near-term alternatives to China while also straining ties with the very nations we should be compromising with to build more robust supply chains. Neither reform requires a difficult cost-benefit tradeoff. They simply stop us from working against our own interests, which makes them and similar fixes the natural place to begin.
Only after that does it make sense to weigh targeted fixes for genuine vulnerabilities. More robust stockpiling, focused on defense needs, could safeguard sectors where the national security risk of a sudden cutoff is highest. Modest efforts to reduce the technical uncertainty of certain high-risk, high-reward innovations, or to address specific problems like workforce development, might be warranted, so long as we remain cognizant of potential pitfalls and put clear limits in place. In an extreme case, more substantial interventions could offset proven, existing market distortions, such as limited countervailing duties to counter Chinese state support for its own minerals industry. But each of these should stay narrow, subjected to explicit boundaries, and clear a genuine cost-benefit test rather than be motivated by panic over our “critical” needs.
>>>READ: Before a Critical Minerals Price Floor, Remove Self-Imposed Barriers
The throughline must be that the risk of true market failure is always weighed against the risk of government failure. China’s dominance of key minerals and the fragility of others’ supply chains do create a legitimate vulnerability. But the current concern is likely overblown. Our long access to cheap minerals has convinced us we cannot live without them, yet markets have a remarkable ability to adapt, often in ways inconceivable to policymakers trying to predict the future.
Government, by contrast, is rigid, and its incentives are frequently misaligned with what is best from an economic standpoint. A costly, permanent response to a threat that proves smaller or shorter-lived than feared is far harder to unwind than it was to enact. The prudent course is to clear away the constraints of our own making and escalate only where a clear and legitimate need for intervention can be justified on the merits.
Read C3 Solutions’ unattributed summary of the roundtable here.
Sage Geosystems has hit a big milestone out on a rugged tract near San Antonio: The startup is producing power from its first next-generation geothermal plant. The system is just the third of its kind to come online in the U.S. as the sector races to commercialize the source of on-demand clean electricity.
The novel geothermal facility in Texas has been running since April, Sage exclusively shared with Canary Media. The Houston-based firm said the 3-megawatt pilot plant has performed reliably and as predicted after more than 120 days of grid-connected operations.
Anthro Energy broke ground on Tuesday on a factory in Louisville, Kentucky, that can make enough battery materials for more than 300,000 electric vehicles.
But the facility’s headline output, 25 gigawatt-hours’ worth of electrolytes, is just part of the story. Anthro’s factory could give solid-state batteries a much needed boost in the U.S.
Battery manufacturers are scouring the planet for materials that aren’t encumbered by “foreign entity of concern” problems — in other words, materials that aren’t somehow controlled by Chinese companies. Anthro hopes its new facility, scheduled to start production in 2028, can help fill that need for many U.S. companies.
Several independent U.S. oil producers are expected to sign production contracts with Venezuela’s state-run oil company in the coming days, according to three industry representatives familiar with the plans — a step forward for the Trump administration’s efforts to boost production in the beleaguered South American nation.
A signing ceremony involving several smaller U.S. producers and the Petróleos de Venezuela had been set for Tuesday evening in Houston, according to the people, who were granted anonymity because details of the event have not been made public. Venezuela’s oil minister is scheduled to attend, as is the head of exploration for PDVSA, one of the people said. The ceremony could be pushed back until Wednesday morning, another of the people added.
This piece was initially published by R Street Institute.
These days, energy policy is ultimately about which types of energy are perceived as good versus bad. Some people like renewables and dislike fossil fuels, so they want to craft energy policy to reflect these preferences. Others believe the reverse—that fossil fuels are good while renewables are bad—and want to use energy policy to promote the former while hamstringing the latter. Yet others are all in on nuclear power or geothermal or some other up-and-coming energy source. There are even those who don’t much like energy usage at all.
>>>READ: Why States Should Reconsider Renewable Portfolio Standards
Here at R Street, we believe energy policy should be technology-neutral. Governments shouldn’t determine which forms of energy are “good” or “bad,” using subsidies and mandates to boost the good while imposing restrictions to hobble the bad. Instead, decisions about the fuel mix should be left to the market as much as possible.
Subscribe for ideas that support the environment and the people.
Given the central role tech neutrality plays in our energy policy philosophy, it’s worth explaining why a technology-neutral approach is so important. Tech neutrality is not simply a matter of abstract fairness, and attempts by government to promote or restrict certain types of energy can become costly for consumers.
Fundamentally, the reason to pursue tech-neutral energy policy is that we don’t know which types of energy will be most valuable in the future. The use of every type of energy involves trade-offs. Wind and solar provide energy with zero fuel cost, but they are intermittent. Natural gas and coal don’t have the same intermittency issues as wind and solar, but they require fuel to run—making them vulnerable to price shocks or disruptions in the fuel supply chain. Nuclear can provide a steady flow of clean power, but it is capital-intensive and has a unique risk profile. And all energy sources face issues related to cost and market dynamics.
If energy technology were static, weighing the trade-offs between these different sources of energy would still be daunting. But the reality is even more complicated: Both technological innovation and broader changes in the economy mean that the trade-offs energy sources face today aren’t necessarily the same ones they will face tomorrow.
For many years, natural gas was considered a high-cost electricity source—so much so that federal law actually prohibited the construction of new gas plants. Now, fracking and other economic changes have made natural gas a relatively low-cost fuel, helping to spur a transition from coal to gas as the backbone of the power system in many regions. Similarly, wind and solar were once niche energy sources valued mainly for their environmental profile. But falling costs have played a role in making them some of the main sources of new power coming onto the grid. Today, a variety of sources from small nuclear to geothermal to hydrogen aim to follow this same path of improved economics and technology to become major players in the market.
>>>READ: Taking the Politics Out of Permitting Reform
When governments use energy policy to favor or stifle certain types of energy, they are implicitly betting that they know which types of energy will be most valuable in the future. If they are wrong, consumers bear the costs. By contrast, a technology-neutral approach means that society can reap the benefits regardless of which energy sources succeed. Allowing all energy sources to compete fairly allows us to take advantage of the unexpected and places the risk of failure on private investors rather than ratepayers and taxpayers. For this reason, R Street will continue to advocate vigorously for tech neutrality in all aspects of energy policy.
Josiah Neeley is the Texas director of the R Street Institute, a nonprofit think tank focused on free markets and limited government.
The Port of Long Beach is moving forward with plans to explore small modular reactors (SMRs) that could eventually provide electricity for port operations and ships, potentially bringing a new nuclear power project to California for the first time in five decades.
The effort involves Bluecore Energy, a startup developing small nuclear reactors designed to operate on floating barges. The company has leased space at Berth 48 at the Port of Long Beach, where it plans to develop and test its technology. Separately, the port has signed a cooperation agreement with the U.S. Maritime Administration (MARAD) to help establish standards for maritime nuclear power.
ISO New England on Monday asked federal regulators to approve a plan that aims to provide increased oversight of “asset condition” transmission projects, a class of projects that are chosen and built by transmission owners mainly to replace aging infrastructure.
Under the proposal — unanimously approved by ISO-NE’s stakeholders — the grid operator would review and report on planned asset condition projects, partly to ensure that they are needed and cost-effective. ISO-NE’s role would be advisory; it would have no decision-making authority over the projects, but its findings could give stakeholders ammunition to challenge cost recovery later.
Thank you for signing up
Help us promote free market solutions for climate change.