The US is using its dominance of a niche petroleum gas as a bargaining chip in its trade war with China. America supplies China with almost all of its ethane, a product of the shale boom that’s used as a building block for making plastics. But the commerce department is now ordering shippers to apply for export licenses, and has told at least one, Enterprise Products Partners LP, that it intends to withhold permits for three China-bound cargoes. The trade war is throwing a spotlight on how the US and China rely on each other for certain commodities — dependencies that both nations are seeking to leverage as they negotiate terms to resolve their dispute. In this case, America is the world’s biggest producer of ethane, which is converted into ethylene for plastics factories, and China is its largest customer. The commerce department has cited risks that petroleum products like ethane could be diverted to the military, copying the playbook deployed by Beijing in justifying restrictions on what it calls dual-use items such as rare earths and other critical minerals. “Ethane is no longer just a byproduct of shale — it’s now a geopolitical weapon,” said Julian Renton, lead analyst covering natural gas liquids at East Daley Analytics. “China bet billions building infrastructure around US ethane, and Washington is now questioning whether that bet should continue to pay off.” America’s shale revolution and China’s rapid industrialization have coincided this century to create a market where cheap energy byproducts are parlayed into millions of tons of materials used as trash bags and shampoo bottles, car seats and computer keyboards. But companies that prospered from cooperation are now caught in the crossfire of an increasingly antagonistic trade relationship between Washington and Beijing. Chinese firms such as Satellite Chemical Co. operate giant petrochemical plants that

The first round of partner selection for the planned Alaska LNG project attracted over 50 companies, lead developer Glenfarne Group LLC has said. The potential partners are from the United States, the European Union, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and India. The companies “expressed interest for over $115 billion of contract value for various partnerships with the Project, including equipment and material supply, services, investment, and customer agreements”, Glenfarne said in an online statement. Alaska LNG, approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission May 2020, will deliver natural gas from the state’s North Slope to both domestic and global markets. It is the only federally permitted liquefied natural gas (LNG) project on the United States Pacific Coast, according to co-developer Alaska Gasline Development Corp. (AGDC). “Alaska LNG’s economic fundamentals allow it to deliver LNG into Asia at prices that are lower than Henry Hub pricing from the U.S. Gulf Coast”, the statement said. Alaska LNG is planned to have an LNG export terminal with a capacity of 20 million metric tons per annum (MMtpa), an 807-mile 42-inch pipeline and a carbon capture plant with a storage capacity of seven MMtpa. Phase 1 aims to deliver gas about 765 miles from the North Slope to the Anchorage region. Phase 2 would install compression equipment and around 42 miles of pipeline under Cook Inlet to the Alaska LNG Export Facility in Nikiski, which would be constructed at the same time. “Glenfarne anticipates a final investment decision on the domestic portion of the Alaska LNG pipeline in late Q4 2025”, the statement said. Brendan Duval, chief executive and founder of New York City-based energy investor Glenfarne, commented, “The many expressions of interest received reinforce that the market recognizes Alaska LNG’s advantaged economics, fully permitted status, and powerful federal, state, and local support”. The project’s

The North American Electric Reliability Corp. is overstating the reliability risks faced by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, according to David Patton, president of Potomac Economics, the grid operator’s market monitor. In its 2024 Long-Term Reliability Assessment released in December, NERC said MISO was at a high risk of having a shortfall in electricity supplies at the peak of an average summer or winter season in the next five years — the worst ranking of all North American regions. “I’d love to work with NERC to figure out where they got their numbers from, because I don’t think they’re accurate,” Patton said Thursday during a technical conference on resource adequacy challenges in the United States held by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. NERC understates MISO’s capacity for demand response, behind-the-meter generation and firm capacity imports by more than 8 GW, Patton said in written testimony to FERC. Also, NERC considered possible power plant retirements that have not occurred, according to Patton. Potomac Economics also acts as the market monitor for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, ISO New England and the New York Independent System Operator. “MISO is the most reliable of any of them,” Patton said. “If I was concerned about the lights going out somewhere, it would not be MISO.” In recent winter storms, MISO exported power to neighboring grid operators to help meet their needs, Patton said, noting the exports reflected the value interconnections between grid operators can have. Further, MISO has been vastly overestimating the power supplies it will need in coming years to meet demand for electricity, Patton said. In its 2024 Regional Resource Assessment, MISO said its footprint may need 17 GW of new resources every year for the next 20 years. “That’s a result of a clearly flawed planning process,” Patton told FERC. In

Dive Brief: The tax credit transferability provision included in the Inflation Reduction Act has introduced new deal structures and is allowing clean energy developers to secure project financing faster, said speakers at a Thursday panel at the American Council on Renewable Energy’s Finance Forum. “The closing of transactions has become so much easier,” said Gaurav Raniwala, global renewable energy leader at GE Vernova. “You don’t have to line up two different structures simultaneously and then close everything when there’s already enough mess going on. And the type of players that are now able to enter the market has broadened significantly.” A Wednesday report from Crux, a finance technology company that connects tax credit buyers and sellers, said lenders are “increasingly” looking to finance less established technologies like carbon capture, and that “this openness is supported by the robust and progressively more liquid market for transferable tax credits.” Dive Insight: Raniwala said that financing had previously relied on the tax equity market, which “was limited in capacity. The industry wanted to be bigger.” “If you really want to have a dominant energy industry which has abundance of supply to help with electrification, to help with all the AI stuff, we need all sources of energy out there,” he said. “And I think what transferability did was it broadened the market from just traditional tax equity to a whole host of players.” Crux’s analysis said that “tax equity structures have evolved to hybrid structures, or t-flips, which explicitly contemplate the sale of a portion of tax credits in the transfer market” and found that t-flips “made up about 60% of the tax equity committed in 2024, and that share is expected to rise.” “Historically, the tax equity market was about a $20 billion a year market dominated for many years by a

Dive Brief: Nearly 35,000 solar power devices are remotely manageable and openly accessible to anyone from anywhere in the world, according to a new report from industrial cybersecurity firm Forescout. These exposed devices with internet-accessible management interfaces, which are made by 42 different companies, include equipment that is essential for operating solar energy infrastructure, according to the Tuesday report. Some of the management interfaces may include password protections, but Forescout said that virtually none of them needed to be online and that any exceptions should be placed behind VPNs. The 10 vendors with the greatest number of exposed devices have each disclosed vulnerabilities in the past decade, increasing the risk of their sitting exposed on the public internet.  Dive Insight: The transition to renewable energy sources and the increasing digitization of the power grid have combined to create serious cybersecurity risks. Forescout’s latest findings illustrate how the absence of secure design practices in critical infrastructure devices also can endanger people’s lives and present opportunities to destabilize entire regions. Forescout’s report — based on a scan of public IP addresses using the Shodan search engine — contains details about the distribution of solar equipment with internet-accessible management interfaces. For example, these devices are more prevalent in Europe and Asia than elsewhere, with three-quarters of the devices residing in Europe and 17% in Asia. Germany and Greece each have one-fifth of the total number of exposed devices. In addition, the 10 vendors with the most exposed devices were not the same as the 10 vendors with the biggest market shares; global titan Huawei, for example, is not on Forescout’s list. SMA’s Sunny WebBox, a device that collects and reports information about the performance of solar inverters, was the most commonly observed piece of equipment left remotely accessible, followed by Fronius International inverters.

Dive Brief: Meta and energy producer Constellation Energy announced a 20-year nuclear power purchase agreement on Tuesday that will give the social media and tech conglomerate access to zero emissions power for its artificial intelligence goals and help keep an Illinois facility online. The agreement will give Meta 1,121 MW of nuclear energy beginning in June 2027 from Constellation’s Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois. The PPA will also support the relicensing and continued operations of the Illinois power plant when a state zero emissions energy tax credit expires in 2027. Meta is among a growing number of tech giants who have turned to nuclear to help offset growing data center energy needs driven by artificial intelligence. The company previously released requests for proposals seeking up to 4 GW of new nuclear energy generation capacity to support its “AI innovation and sustainability objectives.” Dive Insight: Meta’s deal will also allow Constellation to expand the facility to generate an additional 30 MW of power during the 20-year extension of operations, which will also preserve more than 1,000 jobs and deliver an estimated $13.5 million in annual tax revenue, according to the June 3 release.  The Clinton Clean Energy Center had previously been saved by a state zero emissions tax credit program, after it was slated for closure in 2017. Meta’s power purchase agreement is designed to replace that credit and support the continued operations of the plant “without ratepayer support,” according to Constellation. Meta Head of Global Energy Urvi Parekh said in the release that in addition to ensuring the long-term operation of the plant and preserving jobs, the deal demonstrates that “this plant is an important piece to strengthening American leadership in energy.” The deal will also aid the global tech and social media conglomerate in its goal to reach