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Nippon Steel, the parent company of U.S. Steel, is moving forward with its plans to renovate a giant coal-fueled furnace in Gary, Indiana.
The Japan-based steel manufacturer, which acquired U.S. Steel in June, will begin “relining” its largest blast furnace at the Gary Works steel mill in 2026, U.S. Steel CEO David Burritt said this week at an industry conference in Atlanta, details first reported by the Japanese newspaper Nikkei.
Such an investment can extend a furnace’s operating life by up to 20 years — prolonging the company’s reliance on coal-based steelmaking, and potentially delaying America’s broader transition to low-carbon manufacturing methods.
Nippon Steel has committed to spending around $300 million to revamp Blast Furnace No. 14, the largest of four blast furnaces still operating at the sprawling Gary Works complex on Lake Michigan. The Japanese steelmaker said it will spend a total of $3.1 billion across Gary Works as part of a $11 billion capital investment in U.S. Steel’s footprints through 2028.
“Gary Works supports a large number of jobs and demand in the Midwest, and we are moving forward with numerous investment plans to support the industry,” Burritt said at the conference, adding that U.S. Steel and Nippon Steel expect to announce more specific details about their plans soon. (A spokesperson for U.S. Steel confirmed Burritt’s remarks in an email.)
Blast furnaces make the iron that’s turned into high-strength steel, an essential material found in everything from cars, boats, and planes to buildings, bridges, and roads.
The scorching-hot furnaces combine iron ore with purified coal, or “coke,” and limestone to produce liquid iron, which is then moved into a separate furnace to become steel. Only seven of these integrated iron and steel facilities are currently operating in the United States, accounting for about a quarter of total U.S. steel production. But the steel mills are responsible for around 75% of the industry’s greenhouse gas emissions. They’re also among the biggest sources of toxic air pollution in the communities where they operate.
A recent report by the Environmental Integrity Project found the Gary Works complex is a major source of health-harming pollutants like chromium, which can cause breathing problems and increase the risk of lung cancer.
America’s blast furnaces — among the oldest in the world — use specialized bricks that degrade over time. When that happens, companies can decide to undertake a costly and lengthy maintenance process to replace the bricks and prop up aging plants. Or they can put that money toward building cleaner facilities that make use of “direct reduced iron” technology that doesn’t require coal.
Climate advocates and community groups in Gary, Indiana, are urging Nippon Steel to take the second route.
“Today, the company is at a crossroads,” Toko Tomita, campaigns director at the advocacy group SteelWatch, said in a statement. “If this relining decision goes ahead, it would be a slap in the face for communities, and a coffin-nail for Nippon Steel’s reputation on climate.”
Tomita said that relining the Gary Works furnace is “an extremely short-sighted move” that will leave Nippon Steel with outdated facilities at a time when automakers and other major steel buyers are increasingly signaling their demand for products made using lower-emission methods.
At the moment, however, America’s steelmakers seem committed to keeping their coal-based mills up and running.
Along with its four Gary Works blast furnaces, U.S. Steel operates two blast furnaces at its Edgar Thomson plant in the Mon Valley Works in southwestern Pennsylvania — the same complex that suffered a deadly explosion on Aug. 11 at a coke-producing plant. Nippon Steel has announced plans to schedule all six blast furnaces for relining or major repairs by 2030 in order to “extend their useful lives for many years to come.”
Cleveland-Cliffs, the only other U.S. steelmaker that uses coal-fueled facilities, operates blast furnaces across its steel mills in Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan. The Ohio-based firm has said it plans to reline a furnace at its Burns Harbor steel plant in Indiana in 2027.
On an earnings call last month, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves confirmed that, in addition to the relining, the company is no longer pursuing a federally supported project to build a new green steel facility in Middletown, Ohio. Cleveland-Cliffs is instead working with the Trump administration to “preserve and enhance” its Middletown steel mill using fossil fuels.
The Department of Energy has once again delayed the retirement of an oil- and gas-fired power plant, adding to concerns that the Trump administration aims to prevent any fossil-fueled power plant from closing during its term.
Today, the Trump administration reissued an emergency order forcing the Eddystone power plant outside of Philadelphia to stay open another 90 days. The plant’s two main units, totaling 760 megawatts, were originally set to shutter on May 31, but one day before their scheduled retirement, the DOE issued an emergency stay-open order, which expired today.
Eddystone is not the only fossil-fueled power plant being forced to stay open past its closing date. Last week, the Trump administration extended its emergency stay-open order for the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan, which was also slated to close in May.
Before this year, the DOE had wielded its emergency powers sparingly, issuing orders mostly in response to utilities or grid operators who requested federal restrictions be lifted during times of extreme strain on the grid. It has never before used Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to intervene in a power plant retirement, according to Caroline Reiser, senior attorney for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
But under President Donald Trump, the agency is invoking those powers to extend the life of fossil-fueled units that grid planners had already deemed unnecessary, raising costs for consumers and stalling the transition to carbon-free energy.
In today’s order, the DOE once again pointed to an “emergency” in portions of the electricity grid operated by PJM Interconnection, which serves Washington, D.C., and 13 states from Illinois to Virginia. The agency cited recent reports from PJM that found, among other things, that the grid operator could struggle to keep up with demand this summer during heat waves.
The DOE said in the new order that the emergency conditions that led to the first directive are still in place, as summer isn’t over. The Eddystone station’s units 3 and 4 generated over 17,000 megawatt-hours during June, per U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data cited by DOE. They also ran for a combined total of 47 hours during a three-day spell of hot weather in late July.
The order also cites a widely criticized report that the DOE released in July, which energy experts say vastly overstates the risk of grid outages. The citation further confirms fears that the Trump administration will use the methodologically flawed report to continue to justify keeping aging, expensive fossil-fueled power plants online.
PJM has supported both stay-open orders, calling each one a “prudent, term-limited step” that would allow the DOE, PJM, and Eddystone’s owner, Constellation Energy, to analyze the longer-term need for these generators.
“PJM has previously documented its concerns over the growing risk of a supply and demand imbalance driven by the confluence of generator retirements and demand growth,” a spokesperson said in an emailed statement about the new order. “Such an imbalance could have serious ramifications for reliability and affordability for consumers.”
Regulators, energy experts, and advocates have questioned the DOE’s justification for keeping the Eddystone and the J.H. Campbell plants open. They point to the fact that the power plants’ owners, state officials, regional grid operators — including PJM itself — and other experts spent years evaluating the impact of closing these facilities and decided it was safe to shut them down.
For its part, the Eddystone plant has operated infrequently in recent years because the facility was not economical. Constellation filed a deactivation notice with PJM in December 2023, which was approved by the grid operator months later following a study that “did not identify any reliability violations” from the shutdown.
In June, state utility regulators and environmental groups filed rehearing requests with the DOE in an attempt to force the agency to reconsider its emergency orders. The agency denied those requests, clearing the way for critics, like the state of Michigan, to take the agency to court.
Advocates fear that these directives, taken together with recent executive orders and other DOE moves, signal the Trump administration’s commitment to keeping every fossil-fuel plant running, no matter the consequences.
In total, just over 38 gigawatts’ worth of power plants are slated to close between now and the end of 2028, more than two-thirds of which is coal.
Blocking all planned closures of fossil-fueled power plants would be disastrous for efforts to decarbonize the U.S. power grid — and also for consumers, who are already navigating fast-rising power bills. It could cost utility customers billions of dollars each year to prop up this unnecessary infrastructure, according to an August report from research firm Grid Strategies.
The administration’s statements have done little to quell advocates’ fears. In fact, a Tuesday post on X from the DOE was crystal clear.
“Coal plants will STAY IN OPERATION,” it read.
It sure looks like the Trump administration is not going to let any coal plants close down during its term — no matter the cost to consumers and to the climate.
About 27 gigawatts’ worth of coal is slated to retire in the U.S. between now and the end of 2028, per U.S. Energy Information Administration data, equal to roughly 15% of the country’s current coal fleet.
Coal plant retirements have been the engine of U.S. progress in cutting emissions. As natural gas became more abundant and renewables plummeted in cost, more than 140 gigawatts’ worth of coal plants have retired since 2011, when the dirty energy source peaked at nearly 318 GW of generation capacity. Carbon emissions from the power sector have fallen steadily over that same period.
Now, the U.S. gets more power from wind and solar alone than it does from coal, an extremely carbon-intensive form of energy that provided around half of the country’s electricity at the start of the millennium.
But President Donald Trump is trying to put a stop to coal’s demise. On his first day in office, Trump declared a national energy emergency that experts have called baseless and which is now being challenged by 15 states in court. The “emergency” is also belied by Trump’s efforts to obstruct clean energy, which for years has accounted for over 90% of new electricity added to the grid.
Trump has since built on that edict by availing himself of emergency powers to force fossil-fuel plants to stay online past their scheduled retirement.
In May, the Trump administration issued 90-day stay-open orders for two facilities set to close days later: the J.H. Campbell coal plant in Michigan and the Eddystone oil- and gas-burning plant in Pennsylvania. Trump just reupped those mandates for another 90 days. Families and businesses will pay the price: The first three months of continuing to operate J.H. Campbell alone could cost consumers as much as $100 million, estimated Michigan’s Public Service Commission chair.
And in July, the Department of Energy released a specious report that overstates the risk of grid blackouts. States are attempting to make the agency fix the report, which they expect will be used to justify additional emergency stay-open orders for other coal plants. Blocking all planned closures of fossil-fuel power plants could result in billions of dollars in additional yearly energy costs for consumers by the end of Trump’s term.
The administration’s desire to revive America’s dirtiest form of power will only exacerbate the nation’s brewing utility bill crisis. The price of electricity has been rising for several years, and despite promises of slashing energy costs, Trump’s pro-coal, anti-renewables agenda is making things even worse.
The Trump administration’s order to stop construction of the nearly completed Revolution Wind project is putting hundreds of offshore workers out of a job — including dozens of local fishermen who voted for President Donald Trump and are asking him to reverse course.
A week ago, the acting director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Matthew Giacona, ordered the Danish wind developer Ørsted to stop all offshore work on the Revolution Wind farm so the federal government can“address concerns related to the protection of national security interests of the United States.” Giacona did not specify the nature of those security concerns.
Construction began on the 704-megawatt project in January 2024 and is now 80% complete, according to Ørsted. The wind farm is being built off the coast of Massachusetts and Rhode Island in a federally designated “wind energy area” that received sign-offs from multiple branches of the military, Canary Media reported Sunday.
Though often seen as opposed to offshore wind, many New England fishermen have made peace with the industry in recent years.
They increasingly rely on part-time salaries from wind companies as fishing revenues dry up. Over the past two years, Ørsted put 80 fishermen to work on the Revolution Wind project, paying out $9.5 million to captains, deckhands, and fishing boat owners, according to Gary Yerman, a Connecticut-based fisherman who founded and leads a fisher cooperative called Sea Services North America, which has an active contract to work on Revolution Wind.
“Most of us are Trump voters, and we still believe in a leader who builds. That’s why we’re asking President Trump to reverse the stop-work order issued to Revolution Wind by Interior,” Yerman told Canary Media.
The stop-work order echoes a similar one the Interior Department gave in April that froze all offshore work on New York’s Empire Wind project — a move that grounded Sea Services’ fishermen for a month, until Trump lifted the ban.
Yerman and other commercial fishermen remained quiet the last time Trump’s assault on a wind farm put them out of work. This time they’re speaking out.
“It’s madness to stop a project that already had permits,” said Jack Morris, a Massachusetts-based scalloper and manager for Sea Services who voted for Trump. “This is not something any of us planned for: the captains, the crew, the shore engineers, the people we buy food from for our trips.”
Ørsted was one of the first firms building turbines in U.S. waters to employ local fishermen, offering Sea Services a contract in 2021 to perform safety and scout tasks. The cooperative helped build Ørsted’s South Fork Wind — America’s first large-scale offshore wind farm, which went online last year.
Today, it’s common for wind developers to rely on local U.S. fishermen. Avangrid and Vineyard Offshore, codevelopers of the embattled Vineyard Wind project off the coast of Massachusetts, have paid out about $8 million over the past two years directly to local fishermen and vessel owners.
“If the infrastructure and pilings are already in, what good is stopping now?” fisherman Tony Alvernaz told Canary Media when asked about the Revolution Wind pause. A Massachusetts fisherman unaffiliated with Sea Services, Alvernaz works part-time for Vineyard Wind, assisting with the ongoing construction of its 62 turbines. Of those, 17 are already sending power to the grid.
Alvernaz is concerned about the Trump administration’s pattern of halting wind projects without warning and with little justification. Trump has already pressed pause on two of the five offshore wind farms currently under construction in America today.
In a statement Monday, an Ørsted spokesperson said Revolution Wind supports more than 2,500 jobs around the U.S., including “hundreds” of local offshore jobs.
Commercial fishermen have spent a total of 1,109 days working at sea for Revolution Wind, according to Yerman. Now, sitting at the docks due to the Trump administration’s stop-work order, the 15 fishermen who planned to be at sea, working 10-day shifts throughout this month, will get paid nothing.
“Our cooperative only invoices when our boats are on active duty. Fishermen are paid for the days they work, not for standby,” Gordon Videll, CEO of Sea Services, told Canary Media. The group is calling on Trump to lift the ban so that its members can resume the job, which would have involved eight more fishermen helping with an offshore substation this fall.
The extra income from Revolution Wind has been a lifeline, particularly for scallop fishermen who, in recent years, have been severely restricted in how much they can fish.
Strict federal quotas have been put in place to allow scallop populations to rebuild after years of being overfished, according to Morris, but that has meant scallopers — who form the majority of Sea Services’ members — are off the water for about 10 months a year.
Before the pause on Revolution Wind, scalloper Kevin Souza expected to make an additional $200,000 working on the project as a part-time boat captain for two years. Souza told Canary Media in February that, had he stuck to scalloping alone, he’d be “lucky” to earn $100,000 in a single year. The deckhands he hires only bring in around $30,000 per year working on scallop boats, but the offshore wind gig makes it possible for them to earn a “middle-class wage,” said Souza.
Souza has recruited both of his sons, his nephew, and other young people from longtime fishing families to work for the wind industry. They might have otherwise left the scallop industry if not for the supplemental income, he said.
As a group, America’s commercial fishermen have long been loyal to Trump. Last week’s order is shaking that confidence.
“I can’t think of one guy who isn’t a Trumper in our co-op. We’re blue-collar guys (and some gals too) who get up before dawn, work with our hands, and we trusted him to look out for us. The truth is, we love President Trump,” Yerman said.
In New Bedford, Massachusetts, home to the country’s most profitable fishing port, “TRUMP 2024” flags fly from dozens of boats docked in the harbor. A few of those crews work for the offshore wind companies, and at least one captain lowers his MAGA flag before setting out to the wind farms, according to Rodney Avila, a Sea Services fisherman.
That kind of faith makes Trump’s pause on Revolution Wind even more gutting.
“It’s like having the rug pulled out from under you. … Nobody understands why Trump did it. I don’t know what Trump’s agenda is,” said Morris.
Trump’s attacks on wind have dried up job prospects for local fishermen up and down the East Coast. His administration’s hostile actions have thrown sand in the gears of a New Jersey wind farm that planned to start construction in the next three years, Maryland’s first offshore wind farm, and another wind project off the coast of Maine.
In addition to targeting individual projects, the Trump administration has initiated policies intended to undermine the entire sector: killing offshore wind leasing, pausing permitting for wind farms, and sunsetting tax credits critical to their economic viability.
Many fishermen, including those who have pocketed thousands by working at offshore wind farms, remain wary of the companies building turbines out at sea.
“No fisherman loves new structures in the water, but we all have grandkids,” Roy Campanale, a Sea Services member based in Rhode Island, told Canary Media. “We’ve lived with the water getting warmer, watched the fish move north, and had to adapt again and again.”
Trump’s pause on Revolution Wind imposes yet another hardship.
Alvernaz voted for Trump and opposes certain wind farms that he believes pose a risk to his favorite fishing grounds. He said that he does not support Revolution Wind due to its placement on Cox Ledge, a swath of seabed identified by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as critical habitat for Atlantic cod.
But if Trump decides to freeze Vineyard Wind, for example, Alvernaz said he “would not be happy.”
Alvernaz has worked on the water for over 40 years. Yerman’s fishing career spans 50 years. With nearly a century of combined experience in New England’s waters, neither of them are buying the Trump administration’s excuse for pausing Revolution Wind.
“Something about national defense? How can it be an issue of national defense if there are other wind farms out there with the same technology?” pondered Alvernaz. “It’s kind of odd.”
President Donald Trump has put energy front and center during his second term. On his first day in office alone, he froze spending under the Inflation Reduction Act, took a wrecking ball to offshore wind, and declared an “energy emergency,” citing affordability and grid reliability issues.
Critics have dismissed the emergency as a fabrication. Attorneys general from 15 states are challenging it in court. And Trump, whose policies are slowing the construction of cheap, clean energy, is not exactly acting like there’s an emergency at hand.
Take the Revolution Wind project as the latest example. Last Friday, the Trump administration ordered developer Ørsted to stop all construction on the huge, nearly complete project, citing unspecified “national security” reasons. It’s the second time the government has issued such an order to an offshore wind project that would’ve brought clean power to the Northeast.
The stoppage poses a real threat to the grid in New England, which is home to some of the highest power prices in the nation.
Revolution Wind was supposed to start delivering power next year — very soon in grid-planning terms. ISO-New England, the region’s grid operator, said Monday that it is banking on the wind farm to help meet demand and maintain power reserves. Further delays will continue the region’s reliance on natural gas, which ISO-New England has warned is in short supply and which is subject to price volatility.
Blocking major energy projects from coming online is not exactly consistent with declaring an energy emergency.
And yet, the Revolution Wind pause is just one example of how the administration is stymieing clean energy deployment. In recent months, it has rolled back federal subsidies and grants and implemented new federal leasing rules under which renewables are doomed to fail. Because of these policies, the country is expected to build less than half as much clean energy over the next decade — an outcome experts widely agree will raise power prices.
In fact, the only place the administration has acted as if its emergency is real is when it comes to preserving fossil-fuel power plants on the brink of closure.
The U.S. Department of Energy recently extended its emergency order barring a Michigan coal plant from retiring — a decision that cost the plant’s owner $29 million in its first five weeks. And on Thursday, the DOE extended another order keeping a Pennsylvania gas- and oil-fired peaker plant online. Regional grid operators had previously deemed both plants safe to close.
The moves reveal the incoherence at the heart of Trump’s energy policy, which exploits a questionable emergency to prop up expensive and unnecessary fossil-fueled power plants on the one hand — and blocks the fastest-growing and lowest-cost form of energy on the other.
Clean energy is getting its own day of action
If you’ve read even one edition of this newsletter since Trump took office, you’ll know that clean energy is facing a crisis in the U.S. Sun Day aims to elevate that message and boost the transition from fossil fuels with a nationwide day of action coming up on Sept. 21, Canary Media’s Alison F. Takemura reports.
The brainchild of climate journalist and activist Bill McKibben, Sun Day looks a lot like Earth Day. Advocacy groups and individuals will hold more than 150 events across the country, offering tours of homes with rooftop solar arrays, EV test drives, and other just-plain-fun activities like performances and face painting. You can find an event near you via the Sun Day website, or tap into Sun Day’s toolkit to host an event of your own.
Two nuclear plants inch closer to “renaissance”
Two retired nuclear plants each took a step toward restarting this week. On Monday, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved a waiver that will let the Duane Arnold plant in Iowa move toward restarting, which plant owner NextEra Energy hopes to do by 2029. And in Michigan, the Palisades plant has returned to operational status after being decommissioned for three years. The designation just means it can start receiving fuel again — it’s not yet generating electricity.
The Trump administration is pushing for a “nuclear renaissance,” both through the development of new advanced nuclear reactors and the reopening of large, retired facilities. The administration and nuclear advocates say the power source can help meet growing electricity demand, though the U.S.’s most recent attempt to build a new nuclear plant took years and billions of dollars more than expected.
‘It’s madness’: New England fishermen who rely on salaries from their work with Revolution Wind call on Trump to reverse the Interior Department order stopping work on the offshore wind project — and point out that most of them voted for the president. (Canary Media)
From misinformation to memorandum: The Trump administration has turned “capacity density” — a fossil-fuel industry talking point that argues wind and solar take up too much land for the power they produce — into a criterion for federal leasing that renewables are doomed to fail. (Canary Media)
Keeping solar affordable: With power prices on the rise, developers of bill-cutting solar projects for low-income households are finding ways to move projects forward despite federal funding rollbacks. (Canary Media)
Fossil-fuel injustices: A peer-reviewed study finds premature deaths and illnesses stemming from oil- and gas-related air pollution disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latino communities. (Los Angeles Times)
The state of permitting: State lawmakers across the U.S. have introduced a total of 148 bills aimed at restricting clean energy development this year via increased local approvals, expanded setback requirements, and other measures, though only a handful of those proposals have passed. (Latitude Media, Clean Tomorrow)
Visualizing emissions: A research group’s new Methane Risk Map visualizes invisible methane emissions and the harmful pollutants released alongside them, in hopes of warning neighbors about their health effects. (Inside Climate News)
A red flag for nuclear: Former Nuclear Regulatory Commission leaders say the Trump administration’s attempts to exercise control over the independent agency have led senior leadership to depart, “creating a huge brain drain” that raises the risk of accidents. (Financial Times)
Good news for solar: Despite federal setbacks, the U.S. is on track to build a record amount of new solar this year, with the renewable resource estimated to make up more than half of generating capacity added in 2025, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. (Canary Media)
Gas plans fizzle: In the two years since Texas lawmakers created a $7.2 billion state fund to jump-start the construction of more gas-fired power plants, officials have approved only two proposals totaling just $321 million, and developers have pulled other applications over supply chain issues and profitability concerns. (Texas Tribune)
The Trump administration has extended its order to keep a Michigan coal-fired power plant running until November, well past its planned closure in the spring. It’s the latest move in a push to force dirty, expensive power plants to keep operating, which experts warn could saddle Americans with billions of dollars in unnecessary electricity costs.
Just days before the J.H. Campbell plant was set to shutter in May, the administration ordered it to stay open for 90 days — an unprecedented federal intervention in state-regulated utility operations. That order has already cost Midwest utility customers millions, and Michigan’s top utility regulator estimates that keeping the aging plant open longer could burden consumers with more than $100 million in unnecessary costs.
The Department of Energy’s Wednesday extension adds weight to concerns from states, environmental advocates, and clean-energy industry groups that the administration intends to wield emergency powers meant to address true threats to grid reliability to prevent any fossil-fueled power plant from closing nationwide. Doing so would cost consumers between $3 billion and nearly $6 billion per year by the end of President Donald Trump’s term, per an August report from consultancy Grid Strategies.
“The order purports to override the considered judgment and careful work of many federal, state, and regional bodies who actually have authority to keep the lights on,” Michael Lenoff, senior attorney for nonprofit Earthjustice, said in a Thursday statement.
Lenoff is leading litigation against the DOE’s initial order from May. Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel has also challenged that order in court, after the agency failed to respond to requests from environmental groups and eight state utility commissions seeking a rehearing of the decision.
To keep fossil-fueled plants running, the Trump administration is taking advantage of Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act, which gives the DOE the authority to take temporary action to address nearterm grid-reliability emergencies. But many groups say there is no such crisis: Wednesday’s order from Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former gas industry executive and well-known denier of the climate-change crisis, “points to no evidence of an imminent emergency requiring Campbell to keep racking up the bills paid by customers in Michigan and nearby states,” Lenoff said.
“Despite already forcing the plant to run for 90 days, [Wright] points to not a single instance where the plant was needed to keep the lights on,” Lenoff said.
Consumers Energy, the utility that owns J.H. Campbell, reported in late July that it cost $29 million to operate the plant in the first five weeks of the DOE’s stay-open order.
“The coal-fired J.H. Campbell plant has reached the end of its life. Michigan cannot afford to let political interference prolong its operation,” Justin Carpenter, policy director for the Michigan Energy Innovation Business Council, said in a Thursday statement. “So-called temporary extensions only keep an unnecessary, inefficient plant alive, extending its pollution and high costs.”
Later in May, the DOE also used its Section 202(c) authority to order the Eddystone oil- and gas-burning plant in Pennsylvania to stay open through the summer. It was set to close this year too, and, as with the J.H. Campbell plant, utility regulators and regional grid operators had determined that shutting it down would not threaten grid reliability. The DOE’s 90-day order for the Eddystone plant is set to expire in late August.
Lawmakers, advocates, and industry experts are increasingly concerned that the Trump administration intends to apply its Section 202(c) authority more broadly. In particular, critics fear a DOE report issued in July will be used to justify future orders — even though its methodology is severely flawed.
The document was written to comply with an April executive order from Trump that tasks the agency with taking unilateral authority over power-plant closures, circumventing decades-old structures that utilities, state and federal regulators, and regional grid operators follow to determine when power plants can close or when they must stay open.
Earlier this month, clean-energy trade groups and nine Democrat-led states filed rehearing requests with the DOE asking it to redo the July grid-reliability report. They argue the study uses cherry-picked data and flawed assumptions to declare that the U.S. faces a hundredfold increase in grid blackout risks absent federal intervention in power plant operations.
Running aging power plants is expensive for utility customers, both in terms of direct costs on energy bills and the indirect costs of crowding out new, cheaper renewables. Utilities and independent energy developers will build less solar, batteries, and wind power if those plants stay online.
The DOE’s moves come as electricity prices are rising at more than twice the rate of inflation across the country. Wright and Trump have falsely claimed that renewable energy is to blame for that trend.
“By illegally extending this sham emergency order, Donald Trump and Chris Wright are costing hardworking Americans more money every single day for a coal plant that is unnecessary, deadly, and extremely expensive,” Laurie Williams, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, said in a Thursday statement. “While Donald Trump and Chris Wright decry this made-up ‘energy emergency,’ they are simultaneously limiting our access to cheap, reliable, renewable energy.”
While China leads the world in both the production and adoption of clean energy tech like solar and EVs, the country has been slower to tackle decarbonizing heavy industry. That is starting to change.
In July, the Chinese state-owned steelmaker HBIS Group agreed to sell more than 10,000 metric tons of green steel to a buyer in Italy. The agreement set a deadline for delivery by the end of August. That same week, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese visited China and pledged to work together to build out the green steel industry.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., steel producers are backing away from earlier commitments to produce green steel. Just before President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January, the Swedish steelmaker SSAB pulled out of negotiations for $500 million in federal funding to back a project to make iron with green hydrogen. In June, Cleveland-Cliffs abandoned its own green steel effort in Middletown, Ohio, after the Trump administration pressed the steelmaker to use a $500 million Biden-era grant to ramp up coal-fired iron production. Nippon Steel pledged to modernize U.S. Steel after securing Trump’s support for a $15 billion acquisition of its American rival in June, but the Japanese giant’s reputation as a “coal company that also makes steel” suggests the merger could extend the life of blast furnaces in Indiana and Pennsylvania.
“A lot of the rhetoric around competitiveness with China makes it seem like we think we must not fall behind. Stories like this make clear we already are behind,” said Marcela Mulholland, a former official at the Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations who now leads advocacy at the nonpartisan climate group Clean Tomorrow. “It is happening. The green steel example is just one of many.”
China produces a staggering amount of steel each year — more than 1 billion metric tons. About 90% is made with a two-stop process that relies on coal. First, iron is smelted from ore in a coal-fired blast furnace. Then the iron is transformed into steel in a basic oxygen furnace. About 10% of the country’s steel is made with an electric arc furnace, a process that – if powered by green electricity – is much cleaner, but depends on a steady supply of scrap metal as a feedstock. (The U.S. has a decided advantage with this particular technology since most of the steel that the nation produces uses scrap metal in EAFs.)
China has yet to widely implement the technology known as direct reduction of iron, or DRI, which typically relies on natural gas to produce iron but which can also use hydrogen. The country’s supplies of the former fuel are limited, spurring it to experiment with ways to conduct DRI using the latter.
China has many small-scale pilot projects manufacturing steel with hydrogen, but most involve minimal volumes of the material. For example, the country’s No. 2 steelmaker, Angang Steel Co., is producing just 10,000 metric tons of iron from green-hydrogen-fueled DRI per year. HBIS is shipping that volume of steel to Italy this month alone. Only HBIS and another major producer, China Baowu Steel Group, are producing green steel with hydrogen in significant quantities, according to research published last month by the Helsinki-based nonprofit Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air.
How clean the hydrogen is that China uses to make steel is a complicated question.
Hydrogen – the smallest molecule – is already widely used in industrial processes and offers a cleaner alternative to fossil fuels since it produces no carbon dioxide when burned. Yet the vast majority of the global supply of hydrogen is made through methods that use fossil fuels and generate planet-heating emissions. When made with electrolyzers powered by renewable energy, hydrogen produces almost no emissions at all, but production of this form – green hydrogen – is nascent and comes at a high premium. (DRI using green hydrogen paired with EAFs is the highest – but nearly nonexistent – standard for producing green steel.)
Headquartered in Hebei province, HBIS started experimenting with lower-carbon steel in part by using hydrogen captured from its coking plants, where coal is roasted at more than 1,110 degrees Fahrenheit to cook off contaminants and produce an industrial-grade fuel. Roughly 60% of the gas emitted during the process is hydrogen.
It’s unclear how much of the steel HBIS is shipping to Italy is made with iron that employs hydrogen produced from industrial waste processes rather than the green stuff made from electricity generated by nearby renewables. HBIS did not respond to a request for comment.
But David Fishman, a principal at the Shanghai-based energy consultancy The Lantau Group, said “there are quite a few” sources of hydrogen made with renewable power near HBIS’s facility in northern China. He noted that HBIS has a strategic partnership with the China National Petroleum Corp., which launched its first large-scale demonstration project to make green hydrogen in 2023.
The export deal may be a sign of China raising its ambitions for cleaner steel. The national government had set a target for 15% of steel coming from EAFs by the end of this year. But that steelmaking capacity has remained at 10% for more than a decade.
Part of the problem is that provincial steel targets are at odds with the policies set in Beijing. Though the national government opened China to imported scrap steel that could be used in EAFs, imports halved in 2024 compared to the previous year, according to the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air analysis. Ten provinces, meanwhile, ramped up production of coal-made steel in the first half of this year, bringing down prices and disincentivizing more costly green investments, said Xinyi Shen, the China team lead for the Finnish nonprofit, who authored the report.
But if China can deepen its stockpiles of scrap steel, the country could more quickly build out a lower-carbon steel industry using EAFs while it waits to improve technology on green hydrogen that can bring down costs of fully decarbonized steel, Shen said.
“This is a more promising way to produce low-carbon steel,” she said. “For hydrogen steelmaking, it depends on the progress of green power.”
The bottleneck, she said, is “always the feedstock for DRI.”
But two recent policy changes on renewable power could incentivize Chinese companies to use more of the nation’s vast solar and wind resources to generate green hydrogen.
The first, called the 430 policy, took effect on May 1 and requires that new distributed solar arrays — like those on buildings’ rooftops — first power the facility they are sited on before selling any surplus electricity onto the grid. The second, dubbed the 531 policy, eliminates the guaranteed “feed-in tariffs” that renewables projects long benefited from in China, and requires new solar and wind farms to sell electricity on the spot market.
Whether policies that direct renewable power away from the grid benefit hydrogen producers by making that power more available to them depends on the provincial-level strategies for the fuel, which vary, Shen said. But the emergence of overseas buyers willing to pay more for steel made with green hydrogen could drive the market, she said.
Starting next year, the European Union, of which Italy is a founding member, is set to fully implement its Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. The carbon tariff essentially levies an extra cost on imports made with more planet-heating pollution. That means China’s coal-fired steel is about to become less competitive. While China could ramp up scrap-based EAF steel, Shen said the quality of that product tends to be very low, making it unappealing for export. The Italy deal, according to the Boston Consulting Group, shows the levies are creating a market for truly green material.
“This development holds significant implications,” Nicole Voigt, the Boston Consulting Group’s global lead of metals, told Canary Media. “China’s commitment clearly highlights its intent to seize commercial opportunities in the green steel market, especially in Europe.”
It’ll take time for the cost to come down. But China “overall has a long-term direction for carbon neutrality,” Shen said. “This gives companies and investors confidence and certainty to invest into newer technologies.”
Under the previous administration, the U.S. pumped billions of dollars into green hydrogen and clean industrial projects, and made tax credits for renewables available into the 2030s. Even then, America hardly employed all the policy mechanisms at play in China. The federal clean-industry program where Mulholland worked supported a few dozen projects, almost all of which saw their funding yanked away by the Trump administration this spring. Last year alone, China had nearly twice the number of low-carbon industrial demonstration projects. This year, Beijing funded a second set of more than 100 new projects.
“The investment into these new technologies will need a long, stable policy environment,” Shen said. “Long-term, the political goal is there here in China.”
A correction was made on Aug. 18, 2025: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that basic oxygen furnaces directly burn coal.
Massachusetts has taken another significant step toward its goal of a fossil-fuel-free future.
Last week, state regulators issued an order changing who pays when a new customer wants to connect to the gas system, shifting the burden from gas utility consumers as a whole to the household or organization that requests the hookup. Utilities have 30 days from the date of the order to file plans that reflect the new payment guidelines for consideration by regulators.
It may seem like a small change, but it’s actually a pretty big deal, advocates said.
“It means the expansion of the gas system will be much slower than it otherwise would’ve been,” said Mark Dyen, a climate activist working with advocacy groups Gas Transition Allies and 350 Mass. “It says, ‘If you want to add to that for your own benefit, you can pay for it.’”
Massachusetts has for years been at the forefront of efforts to transition away from natural gas. In December 2023, state utility regulators issued a sweeping order — the first of its kind in the country — that made clear the state’s goal is to move away from fossil-fuel use as it aims to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. The 2023 order laid out a framework for how gas utilities will be expected to participate in this evolution.
Last week’s decision on who should pay for gas-line extensions is the latest effort to turn those principles into practice.
Under the old rules, a new customer that wants to hook up their building to gas generally does not have to pay out of pocket: The cost is spread out among all the utility’s customers over the course of several years on the assumption that the newcomer’s future fuel use will create enough revenue to cover the initial price, a practice known as “line-extension allowances.” In 2023, the average cost of such an installation was $9,000, for an annual total of more than $160 million statewide, according to an analysis filed in the case by research firm Groundwork Data.
“Existing customers are subsidizing these new customers,” said Kristin George Bagdanov, senior policy research manager for the nonprofit Building Decarbonization Coalition. “It’s a misalignment of who’s shouldering the costs.”
In their ruling last week, Massachusetts’ regulators agreed with this stance and also declared that the existing approach runs counter to the state’s climate goals by encouraging greater adoption of natural gas. Plus, they said, the current system increases the chance that customers will be left paying for unneeded infrastructure, as more homes and businesses leave the gas system for electricity.
Typically, utilities calculate a 10-year payback period for commercial connections and 20 years for residential. However, as more customers adopt energy-efficiency measures, switch to electric appliances, and even electrify completely, their gas usage — and therefore the revenue they generate for utilities — will drop, extending the payback period, argued Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell in an October filing to state utility regulators.
Currently, more than half of Massachusetts homes are heated with natural gas. However, between 2021 and 2024, about 90,000 households installed heat pumps using incentives from energy-efficiency program Mass Save; the true total, including installations that didn’t go through the incentive program, is likely higher. The state is aiming to get 500,000 households to adopt heat pumps between 2020 and 2030.
“It really doesn’t make sense for existing ratepayers to pay for people to join when we are actively transitioning people off the system,” said Sarah Krame, a senior attorney for the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. “The economics of that don’t make sense anymore. We’re no longer in that world.”
Massachusetts joins a handful of other states addressing the issue of line-extension allowances. Over the past three years, these subsidies have been reduced or eliminated in six states, and another six and Washington, D.C., are now considering reforms, according to the Building Decarbonization Coalition. In 2022, California became the first to do away with the practice. In June of this year, Maryland utility regulators ended the allowances, and New York state legislators passed a bill that will do the same if it becomes law.
“This is definitely a trend we’re tracking,” George Bagdanov said. “It’s part of the larger movement to reevaluate business-as-usual gas system operations.”
A clarification was made on Aug. 14, 2025: This article has been updated to reflect that there will still be a round of comments taken on the new plans utilities must file.
As the Trump administration aims to bolster fossil fuels at the expense of clean energy expansion, new research shows the oil and gas sector has so far failed to become a major jobs creator for heavily fracked areas of northern Appalachia.
“To the degree that we allocate resources to help develop that industry, we’re diverting those resources from other industries that actually could deliver” more jobs and higher per-capita incomes, said Sean O’Leary, author of the recent report from the Ohio River Valley Institute.
The report uses the term “Frackalachia” to describe 30 top oil- and gas-producing counties in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. As a group, the counties have smaller populations and a net loss in the number of jobs compared to 2008, just before Appalachia’s shale-gas boom began.
The counties’ growth in per-capita income also has lagged behind the national average, even as their nominal gross domestic product nearly doubled, increasing their share of the country’s GDP by 6%. Basically, comparatively high economic output from the counties did not produce higher-than-average incomes for their residents.
“Despite immense economic growth as measured by GDP, Frackalachia is in a position of actually having lost jobs since the beginning of the natural-gas boom,” O’Leary said. In his view, the numbers contradict pro-industry pitches for more oil and gas development.
“Whatever else it is, the natural-gas boom is not an engine for economic prosperity,” O’Leary said. He thinks the gas industry is “structurally incapable” of delivering lasting growth in jobs and income for the people living in heavily fracked areas. The Frackalachia counties have also seen relatively few jobs from “downstream” industries, such as the production of plastics, he added.
Oil and gas development is “highly capital-intensive, but not very labor-intensive,” O’Leary explained. Most earnings go to shareholders, investors, and suppliers based far from where fossil fuels are extracted, so only a small share of project income stays in the community to stimulate more economic activity.
Completed wells don’t need many permanent employees, O’Leary said. And many people who work in drilling and fracking come from outside the local area.
Canary Media’s review of data from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services is consistent with that observation. From 2012 through 2022, the agency issued annual reports about the economic impact of the state’s oil and gas industry, including data for both “core” jobs and “ancillary” industries, which support oil and gas development.
More than half of the new hires for the core industry jobs in 2021 came from outside Ohio, according to the state data. Even in ancillary industries, nearly four-tenths of new hires were from other states.
Meanwhile, the state holds clean energy companies to higher standards when it comes to sourcing local labor. Solar developers who want to qualify for certain property tax relief must provide at least 70% of a project’s jobs to Ohio residents.
Canary Media drilled further into the figures from the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services to see how employment numbers compare to those touted by fossil-fuel industry organizations.
As of 2024, the core shale-industry sectors employed almost 9,100 people. The net gain compared to 2012 was about 860 jobs. Employment in those sectors peaked in 2017 at about 16,400.
Roughly 199,000 people worked in the industry’s ancillary sectors in 2024, for a net gain of about 30,000 jobs compared to 2012. However, the Department of Job and Family Services’ reports note that those ancillary sectors support other industries as well, such as engineering services, iron and steel mills, and construction of highways, streets, and bridges.
The Ohio agency numbers fall short of the 204,000 new jobs that an industry-funded report forecast oil and gas businesses might create or support. That analysis was published in 2011, in the lead-up to the 2012 law that set up the state’s current regulatory scheme for drilling and fracking of horizontal wells.
The agency numbers are also far lower than the 79,000 direct and 375,000 total jobs the American Petroleum Institute cited in a 2021 report based on data from 2019.
A communications representative for the American Petroleum Institute declined to answer Canary Media’s questions about that report or the new research from the Ohio River Valley Institute.
A spokesperson for the Ohio Oil and Gas Association did not respond to a phone call and emails seeking comment for this story.
The cyclical boom-and-bust dynamics that often characterize oil and gas development also impact jobs, said Gilbert Michaud, an assistant professor of environmental policy at Loyola University Chicago. In contrast, utility-scale solar could be built out over time, to offer “opportunities for a more stable and consistent workforce,” he said.
An analysis prepared by Michaud and others in 2020 estimated that utility-scale solar development could provide tens of thousands of jobs over the course of a few decades if the state encouraged it. That study came out before Ohio lawmakers added extra hurdles for most utility-scale solar and wind projects in 2021.
Now federal policy has also shifted away from renewables and in favor of fossil fuels.
“While this might spur some jobs in oil and gas, it will also take jobs away from renewables, which can be built nearly anywhere, not just in places like eastern Ohio that have shale resources,” Michaud said. “It will threaten a big renewable energy pipeline that has developed over the past decade or two.”
Earlier this week, two low-carbon cement startups unveiled new partnerships with data-center developers and operators, which are looking at ways to curb the tech sector’s ballooning climate impact.
The separate announcements from Sublime Systems and Brimstone are a striking example of how businesses are pressing ahead with efforts to decarbonize essential polluting industries like cement making — even as the Trump administration guts federal programs meant to kick-start U.S. manufacturing of cleaner construction materials.
Both companies are developing novel ways of producing cement that don’t cook the planet in the process. Cement — the gluey powder mixed with sand, gravel, and water to form concrete — is responsible for roughly 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Nearly all cement is made today by heating carbon-rich limestone in fossil-fuel-burning kilns.
Sublime, an MIT spinout, said on Tuesday that it completed a “pilot pour” of its fossil-fuel-free cement at a data center campus in northern Virginia owned by Stack Infrastructure. Sublime’s approach involves electrically charging a bath of chemicals and calcium silicate rocks. In Virginia, the startup and its partners used the cement to make seven cubic yards of concrete mix, which was then spread over a high-traffic loading dock.
Demonstration projects like these are key to convincing the inherently cautious construction industry to embrace new approaches. “It gives us a proof point to then [do] larger-scale deployments in a few years,” Cory Waltrip, Sublime’s director of business development and strategy, told Canary Media.
Those future deployments could include facilities run by Microsoft. The tech giant recently signed a binding deal to purchase up to 622,500 metric tons of Sublime’s cement products — enough to build roughly 30 professional football stadiums — from the startup’s forthcoming manufacturing facilities. The agreement marks a massive step up for Sublime, which can currently make just 250 metric tons of cement per year at its pilot plant in Somerville, Massachusetts.
Brimstone, for its part, also announced on Tuesday that it signed a commercial agreement with Amazon. The deal allows Amazon, valued at $2 trillion, to reserve future supplies of Brimstone’s low-carbon cement, though the partners declined to provide more specific details.
Oakland, California–based Brimstone sources carbon-free rocks instead of limestone, then pulverizes those rocks and adds chemical agents to leach out valuable minerals. Certain compounds are heated in a rotary kiln to make industry-standard cement. What remains can be used as supplementary cementitious materials — which help bulk up cement mixes — or to make a key component of aluminum.
Cody Finke, Brimstone’s co-founder and CEO, said Amazon began testing Brimstone’s products about a year ago and found they worked just as well as the conventional materials used in Amazon’s buildings. Amazon will get its supply from Brimstone’s $378 million commercial demonstration plant, which is slated to be operating by the end of the decade, Finke said.
The announcements send an important signal that private-sector demand isn’t waning for cleaner construction products — despite the White House abandoning strategies and rescinding funding for using greener cement, steel, glass, and other materials in public buildings, roads, and bridges.
Melissa Hulting, director for industrial decarbonization at the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, said she was “really excited” about the latest news from Sublime and Brimstone.
“In the absence of federal demand … it’s great to see that companies are stepping in and supporting procurement” of low-carbon cement, she said. “I’m hoping that we’ll see more companies, especially with the building up of these data centers, come in and fill that void.”
Still, green cement startups continue to face a sizable challenge in scaling up their pioneering manufacturing plants. The task is likely to be even harder now that the Department of Energy has clawed back crucial funding for industrial decarbonization initiatives.
In late May, the DOE said it was canceling over $3.7 billion in awards for two dozen projects aimed at decarbonizing everything from cement kilns and glassmaking furnaces to mac-and-cheese factories and whiskey distilleries. Sublime was slated to get up to $87 million to build its commercial-scale cement facility in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Brimstone had been awarded up to $189 million to finance the construction of its commercial plant, the site for which is still being decided.
Both Sublime and Brimstone said they’re in ongoing conversations with the DOE to try to appeal the decision. In the meantime, however, the startups are moving forward as planned with their manufacturing facilities.
Finke said Brimstone’s award cancellation felt like an “oversight, because critical materials are such an important topic for the Trump administration.” But he said that losing the federal funding doesn’t affect the company’s long-term strategy, which is focused on raising private capital. To date, the six-year-old startup has raised over $80 million from investors.
Sublime, meanwhile, has raised over $200 million since its founding in 2020, a figure that includes the DOE award. Leah Ellis, Sublime’s co-founder and CEO, said the startup remains on track to begin delivering cement to Microsoft and other customers from its Holyoke facility in 2028.
“We do think what we’re doing is aligned with the current administration’s priorities of creating jobs and investing in modernizing and onshoring manufacturing of important materials,” she said.
“Everything inside Sublime is going as well as we could hope,” Ellis added. “Nobody thought that scaling up a new cement technology would be easy, right? But that’s what we’re here for.”
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