On Tuesday, Axios will hold an event on “The Infrastructure Bill’s Climate Future” featuring Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) at 12:30 p.m.

What we’re watching: While the fate of the Build Back Better bill and its attendant climate provisions is far from certain (and it remains to be seen whether we will see a vote on it before the end of 2021), the infrastructure bill includes several provisions relevant to climate change, beyond the bridges and roads that tend to figure into headlines. These include nearly $50 billion for climate resilience and weatherization, $65 billion for renewables and electricity grid investments and $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations. But the bill’s signature is just the first step: I will have an eye on how both Granholm and Hickenlooper anticipate implementing these major investments.  

Also on Tuesday at 12:30 p.m., the Bipartisan Policy Center will hold an event titled “Scaling America’s Clean Energy Infrastructure” featuring Jigar Shah, the director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.

What we’re watching: Speaking of implementation of the infrastructure package, the new law will result in a swell of resources for the Department of Energy, including investments in advanced technology demonstration and deployment. While Shah’s office already played a significant role in the Biden administration’s forward-looking renewable energy efforts, the new legislation has made it loom even larger. Shah will be at the forefront of martialing these billions of dollars, tasked with ushering the commercialization of new renewable, nuclear and other technologies that the Biden administration and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have positioned as crucial to meeting the country’s climate action goals.

The Biden administration is expected to release proposed biofuel blending requirements for both 2021 and 2022 in the coming days, according to reporting by Reuters. 

What we’re watching: Biofuel blending requirements are a hot-button issue for both the agriculture sector and the oil and gas sector, two powerful lobbies in Washington. Over the course of the pandemic, there have been numerous delays and back-and-forth on whether the requirements, which dictate how much ethanol and other biofuels must be mixed into petroleum products, should be relaxed. 

The upcoming announcement is a long-time coming: The Biden administration has deferred a decision on 2021’s blending policies for over a year, and missed its deadline for ironing out 2022’s policies last week. While the official decision likely will not be released until this week, the Environmental Protection Agency has reportedly told two Democratic Senate offices that volumes for both 2020 and 2021 will be retroactively lower after pandemic-related delays, but will be restored for 2022.

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Once again, it was a big week for oil prices, though we ended in a place not so different from where we began. 

While the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies had planned to gather for a joint technical committee meeting Monday, they postponed the gathering by a few days in order to have more time to evaluate the impact of the new omicron coronavirus variant on oil prices and demand. These discussions happened amid a continued drop in oil prices over the course of the week, though things have leveled off somewhat since the initial, dramatic drop that came with news of omicron. 

And the U.S. use of its strategic petroleum reserves remains a wild card. The Biden administration announced pre-Thanksgiving that the country will release 50 million barrels of crude oil from its strategic reserves as soon as mid-December, but this week Amos Hochstein, the State Department’s senior adviser for global energy security, said in an interview with CNBC that the United States would be prepared to release more crude from its strategic reserves as necessary to cool oil markets.

Meanwhile, Hochstein met with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries in an effort to reframe the United States’ relationship with the cartel and prevent it from changing tack to prop up oil prices by withholding barrels from the market. This is an effort that ultimately bore fruit: In the Thursday OPEC+ meeting, the group ultimately agreed to stick to its plan of gradual crude production increases in the coming months, subverting expectations.

In the other top energy news of the week: 

• Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told reporters that the country will not meet the Biden administration’s electric vehicle goals without investing in domestic semiconductor manufacturing, saying demand is already exceeding supply. The comments, which came before a planned speech in Detroit, came alongside Raimondo’s urging of Congress to pass the Chips Act to designate $52 billion for domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research subsidies.
• Keeping global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius could allow the global economy to grow 2 percent by 2100, new research published in the journal Nature Climate Change found. The researchers warned against even briefly surpassing the temperature threshold, as many models predict, saying doing so could cause permanent ecological damage and would require carbon removal at an impossibly large scale to reverse the warming. 
• Exxon Mobil Corp. has set a goal of reducing its companywide greenhouse gas intensity by 20-30 percent by the end of the decade, though it has not pledged to make the more aggressive emissions cuts that its European competitors have targeted. This updated emissions plan is the first that Exxon has released since the activist hedge fund Engine No. 1 gained seats on its board after arguing the company is not prepared to operate in a low-carbon economy.
• A major report mandated by Congress from the National Academy of Sciences found that the United States is the biggest contributor to the world’s mounting plastic waste crisis. The average person in the United States generates roughly 287 pounds of plastics per person, and worldwide roughly 8 million metric tons end up in the ocean, a volume that is expected to continue to mount.
• The House Science Committee has solicited methane leak data from 10 major oil companies operating in the Permian Basin, including Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp., in a bid to meet the emission reduction requirements of the Global Methane Pledge. The lawmakers are demanding information about how the companies found the leaks, as well as details about how their emissions calculations differ from those mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

290 gigawatts

That’s how much renewable electricity was added to grids globally in 2021, according to a report from the International Energy Agency. This is more than has ever been added before, but the record total is still just about half of what is needed annually to achieve net zero by 2050, the report said. Fossil fuel and nuclear power’s capacity totals 4,800 GW globally.

1) Meet Biden’s ‘climate cabinet’: A who’s who of 9 senior officials tackling climate change

Matthew Brown, USA Today

2) Taking the Temperature: An Energy and Climate Tracker

Lisa Martine Jenkins, Morning Consult

3) Cautious hope for CO2 capture after “false starts”

Ben Geman, Axios

4) Drive a gas-guzzler, buy a coal mine and other uses of reverse logic

Tim Harford, Financial Times

5) U.S. will miss electric-vehicle targets without big investments in semiconductor manufacturing, commerce secretary warns

Jeanne Whalen, The Washington Post

6) What happens when America’s coal plants die?

Matt Krupnick, The Guardian

7) Renewables may be a victim in Texas grid revamp

Edward Klump, E&E News

8) Forget Gas and Hydrogen. Your Next Boiler Should Be a Heat Pump

John Ainger, Bloomberg

9) Manchin seeks more energy, climate tweaks to reconciliation

Emma Dumain et al., E&E News

10) America’s Power Plants Are Low on Coal

Ryan Dezember, The Wall Street Journal

• Billions for Climate Protection Fuel New Debate: Who Deserves It Most (The New York Times)
• Nissan to Spend $17.6 Billion on Battery-Powered Vehicles Over Five Years (The Wall Street Journal)
• Wanted: A Town Willing to Host a Dump for U.S. Nuclear Waste (Bloomberg)
• Key U.S. Business Lobby Likes Biden’s Climate Plan, Rejects Tax Hikes (Bloomberg)
• PG&E to pay $125 million in fines and penalties under Kincade fire settlement (Los Angeles Times)