Oil and Gas Watch

Brendan Gibbons

December 18, 2025

Taxpayer-subsidized carbon capture is driving a backlash in Louisiana, Texas and other states

Driven by billions in taxpayer subsidies, companies are planning hundreds of projects across the U.S. intended to capture carbon dioxide emissions from industry and pump the pollution underground. The wave of carbon capture, transportation, and storage projects is triggering backlash in the form of lawsuits, grassroots activism, and regulatory changes. States in the Gulf Coast and Midwest have had public debates and court battles over some of these projects.

December 19, 2024

Why climate-skeptical Republicans may protect billions in taxpayer funding for a climate program

Funded by billions of dollars in new taxpayer subsidies approved by the Biden Administration, more than 160 projects have been proposed across the U.S. to capture carbon dioxide pollution from industry and bury it underground as a strategy to address climate change. But Donald Trump, who has called climate change a hoax, is returning to the White House, and climate-skeptical Republicans are taking control of Congress. The politics within the Republican Party and the economic interests of the oil and gas industry make Congress unlikely to eliminate subsidies for carbon capture. More than 90 percent of taxpayer-supported carbon capture projects in recent years have been run by fossil fuel companies.

Brendan Gibbons

December 5, 2024

The huge new oil project in Alaska that is escaping national attention

Last year, environmentalists criticized the Biden Administration for approving a large oil drilling project on public land in the Alaskan Arctic called the Willow project. However, a similar petroleum project has drawn little attention. About 30 miles east of Willow, Australian energy company Santos, Spanish company Repsol, and ASRC Energy, a subsidiary of the Alaska Native-owned Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC), has received approvals and is currently building the first phase of the Pikka Project, an effort to produce hundreds of millions of barrels of oil over the next three decades. The project is located entirely on land owned by the State of Alaska and the ASRC.

Brendan Gibbons

November 21, 2024

Trump’s pick for Interior Secretary likely to increase drilling on federal public land 

To run the U.S. Department of the Interior and supervise drilling on federal land, President-elect Donald Trump last week selected Doug Burgum, a billionaire former software executive and real estate developer who has served as North Dakota’s governor since 2016. If confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would oversee the federal agency most in charge of oil and gas leasing and development in federal coastal waters and on federal lands. Project 2025, often seen as a playbook for the next Trump Administration, calls for a rollback of Biden’s efforts to reduce leasing on federal lands, as well as to “conduct offshore oil and natural gas leases to the maximum extent possible.” 

November 21, 2024

Plastics plants dump 1,4-dioxane and other pollutants with no EPA limits

In South Carolina, a plastics manufacturing plant called Alpek Polyester Columbia dumped about 30,000 pounds of a chemical, 1,4-dioxane, into the Congaree River last year, with no limits on the pollutant – a likely carcinogen – in the plant’s discharge permit. The Alpek plant was the largest discharger of 1,4-dioxane among plastics plants in the U.S. last year, releasing a pollutant that EPA last week concluded “poses an unreasonable risk of injury to human health” including in drinking water. But despite this risk, EPA has set no national standards for plastics manufacturing plants to control 1,4-dioxane or several other harmful pollutants, according to a new report by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) called “Plastic’s Toxic River.”

November 14, 2024

Why Trump’s ‘drill, baby, drill’ policies will not reduce U.S. oil and gasoline prices

Donald Trump won a return to the White House in part by convincing American voters that he would unleash more oil and gas production, which would reduce fuel prices, curb inflation and cut grocery prices. But petroleum industry experts doubt this will work in a global market. Energy experts say American companies will not simply produce more petroleum and sell fuel at a lower price because competing nations like Saudi Arabia could simply reduce their own production and keep global prices high for their own financial or political reasons.