Overnight Energy & Environment

Energy & Environment — Energy chief, oil execs hold ‘constructive’ meeting

by Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk 06/23/22 08:00 PM ET

President Biden’s Energy secretary met with oil executives on Thursday as the administration faces pressure to tamp down sky-high gas prices. Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service has reinstated pre-Trump endangered species protections.

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Energy Dept. says oil meeting was ‘productive’

Oil executives and industry groups said a Thursday meeting with Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm was “constructive.”

“Today’s meeting was a constructive conversation about addressing both near-term issues and the longer-term stability of energy markets,” said Mike Wirth, CEO and chairman of Chevron, in a statement.
“We remain optimistic about our ability to work together to achieve these shared objectives. We appreciate Secretary Granholm’s invitation to participate in the conversation, which was an important step toward achieving greater energy security, economic prosperity, and environmental protection,” he added.

The American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, which respectively represent the oil industry broadly and oil refiners specifically, issued a similar sentiment.

“Secretary Granholm’s meeting with American refiners today was a constructive discussion about ways to address rising energy costs and create more certainty for global energy markets,” the organizations said in a joint statement.

An Energy Department readout of the meeting likewise described it as “productive.”

“The meeting took a productive focus on dissecting the current global problems of supply and refining, generating an opportunity for industry to work with government to help deliver needed relief to American consumer” the department said.

Relationship status — it’s complicated: The positive comments from both sides come amid a period of tension between the Biden administration and oil companies. In a recent letter to oil refiners, Biden criticized their high profits.

“At a time of war, refinery profit margins well above normal being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable,” he wrote in the letter.
And ahead of the meeting, Wirth wrote a letter to Biden criticizing what he described as attempts to “vilify” the oil industry.
“Notwithstanding these efforts, your Administration has largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry. These actions are not beneficial to meeting the challenges we face and are not what the American people deserve,” he wrote on Tuesday.

The deets: Granholm was scheduled to meet Thursday with executives from ExxonMobil, Shell, Valero, Marathon, Phillips 66, BP and Chevron.

According to the Energy Department readout, participants discussed what the companies are doing to maintain existing operations and hurdles in increasing domestic refining, in which oil is made into gasoline.

Biden administration reinstates habitat protections

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Marine Fisheries Service on Thursday announced a new rule reversing a Trump-era definition of “habitat” as applied to endangered animals.

Under the 2020 rule, the definition of federally-protected habitats for endangered species was narrowed to only those where a species could currently live, excluding those that could someday sustain a species. On Thursday, FWS reversed this, saying it contravened the intent of the 1973 Endangered Species Act (ESA).

When it narrowed the definition, the Trump administration argued that its changes would be more consistent and transparent for landowners.
But environmentalists said that the government should be able to protect land that could support an animal in the future and described the Trump move as a “giveaway to industry.”

“The growing extinction crisis highlights the importance of the Endangered Species Act and efforts to conserve species before declines become irreversible,” Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz said in a statement.

“Today’s action will bring implementation of the Act back into alignment with its original purpose and intent and ensures that species recovery is guided by transparent science-based policies and conservation actions that preserve America’s biological heritage for future generations.”

Draft finds mining would pose risk to watershed

A federal study released Thursday determined that hardrock mining in a Minnesota wilderness area would risk contaminating the region.

In its assessment, the U.S. Forest Service said copper-nickel mining would pose a major risk to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. While the assessment is a draft, it proposes a 20-year ban on copper mining on federal lands in the watershed.
Potential fallout from mining in the area includes “the creation of permanently stored waste materials” upstream, which could lead to the release of water with elevated levels of acidity and metal contamination, the assessment states.

“The greatest potential risk to water quality of the wilderness area and lands within the withdrawal areas comes from catastrophic failure of a wet basin tailings storage (impoundment) dam,” the assessment added.

“Wet basin tailings storage poses the risk of dam failure and the potential release of a large volume of contaminated sediment (tailings) and water to a nearby water body with potential transport of it to downstream water bodies and receptors.”

The assessment comes nearly six months after the Interior Department announced the cancellation of two mining leases in the area, which were granted under the Trump administration in 2019. The January legal opinion determined the Trump administration had improperly renewed the leases in 2019 after initially approving them the year before.