Oil prices were little changed Friday after the U.S. said its naval blockade of Iranian ports could continue “indefinitely,” reigniting concerns over energy flows through the critical Strait of Hormuz.
Brent futures, the international benchmark, lost 5 cents to $87.02 per barrel, while U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures were 1 cent lower at $81.24.
The Trump administration said Wednesday it would cancel three proposed federal corridors designed to speed the development of multi-state electric transmission lines that were selected during the Biden administration.
The decision lands as the Trump administration battles broader affordability concerns ahead of the November midterm election amid rising electricity prices and growing energy demand.
A June geothermal lease sale held in New Mexico by the Bureau of Land Management netted more than $16.5 million, making it the second-highest-grossing sale in BLM history, while the top bid set a federal record of $701 per acre.
Forty-seven parcels sold at an average of $107 per acre, more than triple the $32 per acre average recorded in Nevada’s October 2025 sale, according to Enverus Intelligence Research. Only 17% of parcels sold at the $2-per-acre minimum bid, down from 76% in 2019, as competition increased for geothermal sites with stronger development potential, EIR said.
Last week, the Trump Administration announced more than $2 billion in new federal money for battery and critical minerals companies. The largest piece was a $1.4 billion loan to the silicon-anode battery maker Sila Nanotechnologies, alongside smaller deals for a scandium mine, a rare-earth-free magnet maker, a direct government ownership stake in a bauxite company, and grants for mining schools. It is the latest in a long series of federal investments; by the administration’s own count, it has signed or approved minerals deals worth nearly $40 billion since taking office.
>>>READ: Before a Critical Minerals Price Floor, Remove Self-Imposed Barriers
These actions rest on a genuinely bipartisan worry over the concentration of supply chains for minerals crucial to modern energy, computing, and defense technologies. Globalization and the pursuit of economic efficiency drove specialization, which has concentrated many supply chains. Mining and refining face an elevated risk of disruption because new capacity takes years or decades to build and markets are therefore slow to adapt. The concern is further heightened by the fact that several chokepoints are in countries prone to instability or hostile to the U.S. China, in particular, which dominates the mining and processing of many key minerals, has recently restricted exports in response to U.S. trade controls and sanctions on Chinese firms.
The risks posed by this concentration are worth taking seriously. The problem is that these tools may force taxpayers to take on unnecessary risk—leaving them stuck with the bill if the companies fail—without addressing the underlying problem. And more broadly, it is not clear that these investments, or the further government actions proposed, are being properly weighed against the true threat posed by supply-chain concentration.
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Equity stakes and loans may seem better than direct subsidies because, in theory, loans are repaid, and government ownership means taxpayers share in the gains if a company succeeds. In practice, these mechanisms socialize the risk, often in exactly the cases where private investors judged the returns not worth it. And the firms that declined to finance these ventures had incentives that were aligned with getting the answer right. Government officials do not, and their real objective is more than likely political gain, such as jobs in certain districts, handouts to connected firms, or the appearance of action on a salient issue, rather than a good return on their investment. At worst, politically motivated deals open the door to corruption, or at least its perception.
Government has no special talent for picking winners, and strong reasons to pick worse than investors who are putting their own money on the line. And once the government is an investor or owner, it also has a political incentive to prop up failing firms rather than cut its losses.
A potential rejoinder is that government needs to “de-risk” certain investments to correct a market failure. In this case, the markets are underweighting the danger of relying on a single hostile supplier. The argument is that if returns are too low for private capital to bear the risk, then private financing won’t exist, and the government can step in to shoulder some of the risk and unlock the social benefits of supply chain resilience. But this assumes government can identify the true value of supply-chain reliability better than private firms can, and there is no reason to think it can. It is also plausible that markets are actually overvaluing resilience, in which case government efforts to subsidize diversification would themselves be economically inefficient.
>>>READ: Critical Minerals Policy Needs Clear Guardrails
Even granting a role for government, singling out individual companies is the wrong policy tool. It rewards firms with the best lobbyists rather than the best prospects, leaving the underlying systemic problems untouched. A broader tool, such as a price floor or an across-the-board production subsidy, would at least allow the strongest producers to rise on their merits rather than concentrating government support on a small number of firms and undermining competition. But it would also be far more expensive and far more distorting.
All of this should be measured against the thing it’s meant to prevent: the cost of an actual disruption. That cost is hard to pin down, but the government’s own estimates are telling. By the U.S. Geological Survey’s accounting, even the highest-risk minerals, such as samarium, with a probability-weighted damage of $4.5 billion, would cause damage that is small relative to a roughly $30 trillion economy.
That is real harm, and there are additional national security questions that are difficult to put in economic terms. But before blindly jumping into government investments and broad policy tools that will raise consumer costs and put taxpayers on the hook, there should be a serious accounting of whether these programs are worth the cost. In the meantime, policymakers should avoid interventions that entail significant risks and high costs in favor of removing existing constraints, such as trade barriers, permitting requirements, and other regulatory obstacles.
TRISO-X has extended its research and development agreement with Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) by 30 months. The two organizations have worked together since 2016. Their joint effort centers on improving the chemical engineering methods used to manufacture tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) nuclear fuel.
“ORNL has been a critical partner in transforming years of TRISO fuel research into commercial manufacturing capability,” said Joel Duling, President of TRISO-X.
The US attempt to shift away from dependence on China for lithium, critical for batteries in electric vehicles and smartphones, has seen the Trump administration invest in Lithium Americas’ $3 billion Thacker Pass mine in Nevada. The renewed interest in developing the metal domestically has resulted in about 115 proposed mines popping up across the country.
But growing water scarcity in the western US as climate change takes effect could undercut lithium production, Northwestern University researchers said in a report.
Water scarcity has become a rising political, legal and financial obstacle as America races to build a domestic lithium industry, US researchers say, increasing the stakes on efforts to lessen its reliance on China.
Over the past few weeks, smoky skies have spread across the United States and Canada. From the Canadian fires that pushed the Northeast and Great Lakes air quality to dangerous levels last month to the fires burning in the Northwest today, there seems to be no end in sight. The need to reduce fire risk is apparent, and we know how to do so through active forest management. Yet policy continues to slow those efforts down and that urgently needs to change.
>>>READ: America’s Wildfire Economics Are Backwards
In fact, one of the most effective ways to limit fire severity is through hazardous fuel reduction. A UC Davis study found that treatments such as prescribed burns and mechanical thinning reduced total burn area by 36 percent, prevented the loss of 4,000 buildings, and avoided almost 3 million tons of CO2 emissions.
Reducing wildfire emissions has to be part of any serious climate strategy because even one bad fire season can wipe out decades of climate progress for states.
For too long, regulations under the Clean Air Act have penalized states for smoke from prescribed fires used to reduce wildfire risk, while excusing wildfire emissions. The Clean Air Act’s exceptional events classification allows states to exclude wildfire smoke from federal air quality standards because those emissions are considered beyond their control. Ironically, smoke from the tool that could prevent much larger wildfires–prescribed burns–is not exempt. Because exceeding CAA standards and falling into nonattainment could trigger additional permitting requirements, loss of funds, or restrictions on economic development, states are perversely incentivized to avoid fuel treatment. The EPA has attempted to amend this by allowing states to apply to exclude prescribed burns, but the process is burdensome and rarely successful. Both the Wildfire Emissions Prevention Act and the FIRE Act would reform this.
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For decades, the country has let critical prevention projects sit for years in the name of “environmental protection,” even as acres burn waiting to clear permitting statutes like the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act. These statues also leave projects subject to costly, time consuming litigation despite the Forest Service winning almost 80 percent of these cases.
The Fix our Forests Act, which passed the House last January and advanced out of the Senate Committee in October, would largely address these permitting barriers. The bill would expand opportunities for active forest management and reduce the litigation burden that delays these projects for far too long. Expediting environmental permitting reviews and allowing more projects to move forward without years of analysis through categorical exclusions would help the Forest Service to manage more acres. According to the House Natural Resources Committee, over 117 million acres of forest across the country are overgrown and at risk of fire. Tools like the Good Neighbor Authority and Shared Stewardship can help tackle that massive backlog of acreage by encouraging states, localities, and tribes to take on more management work in the forests close to home.
>>>READ: Taking Action to Reduce Wildfire Risk
More recently, wildfire prevention efforts have fallen under the Trump administration despite funding levels remaining elevated. This could be, in part, due to a 6,000-worker reduction in the U.S. Forest Service. Additionally, Congress pulled back on annual appropriations for treatments because of increased funding under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, rather than taking it as an opportunity to amplify treatment. Increasing funding for fuel treatment would pay for itself 3 times over; the same UC Davis study found that each dollar spent on prevention saves about $3.75 in wildfire damages.
We also must consider where we are building and what we are building with. Nearly a third of U.S. housing is located in the Wildland-Urban Interface, where homes and development meet undeveloped wildlands. A 2016Nature Climate Change article predicted that future increases in human exposure to wildfires would be driven largely by population growth in fire-prone areas, rather than because of more acres burned.
The recent fires in Spokane, Washington illustrate that point clearly. While the fires burned around only 10,000 acres, more than 800 structures were destroyed, and 65,000 people were evacuated.
In WUI communities, “home hardening” with fire-resistant materials should be a priority in any new builds as well as upgrades. Part of the fix is simply not to build subsidized housing in the WUI. Insurance rates should properly convey the risk and incentivize homeowners to harden their homes, thereby reducing the risks, costs, and insurance premiums. Home hardening for new builds and retrofits is already cost-competitive; a Fall 2025 report from Headwaters Economics estimates that the construction cost premium is only 2-3% compared to traditional construction.
Additionally, the designation of “fireshed management areas” under the Fix our Forest Act would expedite hazardous fuel treatments in the Wildland Urban Interface and ensure communities most at risk are prioritized.
Nationwide, over 6 million acres have burned this year, well over the 10-year average. It’s high time we begin managing our forests before they burn and remove policy barriers that stand in the way.
Dominion Energy will need to change its transmission cost allocation policy to directly assign the cost of certain transmission infrastructure to the new large-load facilities — such as data centers — which made that infrastructure necessary, the Virginia State Corporation Commission said in an order filed July 31.
The mandatory contribution in aid of construction, or CIAC, will apply to “direct connect” facilities, and apply to the cost of the substations and the transmission lines which connect those facilities to the grid.
In April, incumbent utilities in MISO and SPP seized on grid strain from elevated electricty demand to make a remarkable ask. A coalition calling itself the Grid Acceleration Coalition — ITC, Ameren, American Transmission Company (ATC), Entergy, Evergy, Xcel and others — asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to suspend competitive bidding for transmission projects across grid operators MISO and SPP for five years, or to let utilities bypass it project by project. It claims competitive solicitations add 16 to 20 months of delay that America cannot afford.
For years, many of these same utilities have waged — and overwhelmingly lost — a policy campaign in statehouses, pushing “right of first refusal” laws that hand incumbents every new regional transmission line without a contest.
Having failed to eliminate competition from the states, they now want FERC to do it.
A startup that makes giant iron-air batteries that store enough power to last several days has raised a new round of funding valued at $750 million.
Form Energy, which has now raised more than $2 billion in total, plans to use the money to boost manufacturing at its Weirton, WV, plant and for its first wave of commercial projects, including a project for the utility Xcel Energy in partnership with Google.
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