Net Zero

1. Permitting progress
2. Going for green
3. China’s grip on graphite
4. H2 snake oil?
5. Africa’s EV readiness

A promising new way to shut down coal plants, and a weird new way to recharge EVs.

Permitting’s painstaking progress

A US permitting reform bill sponsored by Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.V.) and Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) inched forward, but faces familiar obstacles en route to becoming law. The bill passed the Senate’s natural resources committee on Thursday with strong bipartisan support, putting it in the running for a vote during President Joe Biden’s remaining months in office. But even though many analysts agree the bill’s clean-energy provisions outweigh its fossil fuel provisions, in terms of emissions savings, it still faces opposition from some climate activist groups and Democratic politicians. “Sadly, the reforms currently on the table perpetuate the same old outdated debate: they give an advantage to the already heavily advantaged Big Oil, and make renewables a tag-along,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) told Semafor. The way out of that dilemma, he said, is to strip out everything except provisions supporting long-distance power transmission: “If the bill was just transmission then I’d be all in.” The challenge will be convincing Republicans to give up on fossil fuel protections in this bill when they may be within reach of controlling Congress and the White House next year.

Olympic-sized carbon offset purchase

The Paris Olympics might be the lowest-carbon iteration of the games in the modern era, but there are two obstacles in its race to win the green medal.

According to statistics from the Paris 2024 organizers, the total carbon footprint of the games is about 1.5 million metric tons, which is less than half as much as the average of other summer games in the last decade. Most of the reductions came by limiting the games’ physical footprint; 95% of the buildings in use for the games are either temporary or existed already, and organizers sourced low-carbon building materials and tried to avoid air conditioning. They also secured enough solar and wind power credits from the French utility EDF to cover the games’ electricity needs.

But the largest piece of the games’ footprint — the travel-related emissions needed to bring athletes and fans to Paris, roughly equal to the emissions from two gas-fired power plants running for a year — remains unaddressed. And the organizers’ strategy to reach net zero for unavoidable emissions relies heavily on the purchase of carbon offsets from forest conservation projects of a style that has been criticized by scientists for routinely overstating their benefits.

China controls yet another vital ingredient for the energy transition

Investors and businesses are increasingly focusing on an often-overlooked material — graphite — because of its vital role in batteries, storage technology, and the potential fortune to be made in undermining China’s overwhelming dominance of its production.

Graphite is a key element in lithium-ion batteries used in electric vehicles and other devices that require energy storage. China’s monopoly over its production, refining, and export is worrying executives looking to diversify their supply chains and could see it emerge as a potential flashpoint,between Washington and Beijing.

“Twenty four months ago, all the conversation was about more energy-dense batteries,” Keith Norman, chief sustainability officer at Lyten, an advanced materials company that is one of several looking to replace graphite in batteries, said in an interview. “Then, in the middle of last year, we started to see talk ramp up around resiliency of the supply chain.”

Companies like Lyten and Group 14 are leaning into business models that reduce Western dependence on graphite from China, betting that if unseating the country’s dominance is indeed possible, it won’t be by building industries that directly compete with China’s own behemoths, but by developing new technologies that allow battery customers to choose to sidestep China.

Is ‘hydrogen compatibility’ worth it?

Emissions reduction achieved in a gas-fired power plant by replacing half the gas with green hydrogen. “Hydrogen-compatible” gas turbines are a hot commodity among utilities and their hardware suppliers, who want to continue building natural gas infrastructure today in the hope that an infusion of low-carbon hydrogen later this decade can keep it from becoming a stranded asset when climate policy clamps down harder on fossil fuels. But that may be a delusion, a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis found. There’s not enough green hydrogen, or pipelines to move it, to make the plan viable, especially since vast amounts are required to achieve a relatively modest carbon benefit. Regulators should require utilities to reveal more details about their hydrogen plans, the report argues, or else the added costs of hydrogen “compatibility” could raise power prices with no benefit.

Africa’s EV readiness

Electric vehicles could provide a host of public health and economic benefits in African countries, but are held back by their high upfront cost. Most African countries lack the grid infrastructure and policy guidance needed to support a growing EV market, according to a study by the Energy for Growth Hub think tank. Just a few — including Morocco, Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda, Ghana, and Namibia — are ready to adopt EVs at scale, the report found. Unlike in Western countries, there’s not a big climate benefit to be had from EV adoption in Africa, since grids are relatively dirty and baseline transportation emissions are already very low. But EVs could go a long way to improving urban air quality, and reducing countries’ reliance on financially crippling oil imports. Stabilizing electric grids needs to be a top priority for EV-interested governments, said Rose Mutiso, the study’s author. But the root of the challenge runs deeper.

“The most sobering finding for me was just how pitifully low motorization rates are in Africa — we are way behind global and even developing-world averages,” she said. “This is a very foundational constraint on EV markets, so task number one for governments is to lift people out of poverty. That seems banal, but we can’t escape this hard truth.”

New Energy

• The energy transition is creating a windfall for cable companies and their investors — to the chagrin of their customers and antitrust regulators.

Fossil Fuels

• Alex Beard, the billionaire former heading of oil trading at Glencore, was charged with corruption by the UK’s white-collar crime office, relating to his work in West Africa.
• Methane emissions from US oil and gas fields are eight times higher than the industry’s target, and four times higher than government estimates, according to an Environmental Defense Fund analysis.
• Shell’s profit for the second quarter beat Wall Street expectations. Solid performance by the upstream drilling division outweighed lackluster returns from oil refining.

Finance

• Investors are lining up behind a new kind of carbon offset credit derived from the early closure of coal-fired power plants in Asia.

Politics & Policy

• As high-stakes elections take place around the world, a new generation of climate activists is being swept into high office.
• Hungary and Slovakia are annoyed with Ukraine for choking off their supply of Russian crude oil. But EU officials say the two countries haven’t tried hard enough to find non-Russian alternative sources.

EVs

• Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), one of the top-ranking China hawks in Congress, is not pleased about Uber’s plan to buy 100,000 EVs from BYD, and warned the deal could put Uber users’ data at risk, Axios reports.

• Volkswagen is planning to cut costs after its second-quarter profits came in below its expectations.
• Here’s a head-scratching new way to extend the range of EVs: Put a gas-fueled generator in the back to recharge the battery on the fly.

COP29

• Diplomats gathered at an elegant mountain resort in Azerbaijan to lay the groundwork for an agreement on global climate finance fundraising, but didn’t make any tangible progress toward a deal.

• Will the Fed rescue clean energy?
• Anyscale, software provider for OpenAI and other major firms, hires new CEO to boost sales.