It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Friday, February 07, 2025
Norway Considers Energy Export Curbs, Sending Shockwaves Through Europe
The rapid expansion of renewable energy in Europe has destabilized the energy market and led to soaring prices in neighboring Norway.
Norway's government collapsed due to internal conflict over how to respond to the EU's energy policies and the resulting high energy prices for Norwegian citizens.
Norway is considering restricting energy exports to the EU, which would have a significant impact on Europe's energy security.
Europe’s energy rules have caused chaos in Norwegian politics – and now the chaos in Norwegian politics is going to create chaos in European energy markets. The negative feedback loop comes at a critically bad time for Europe, as the continent’s energy security continues to falter three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Over the past few years Europe has supercharged its renewable energy transition in order to boost energy independence and security. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February of 2022, Europe was enormously reliant on the Kremlin to keep the lights on and the economy running. As of 2020, Europe relied on Russian energy imports for a whopping 20% of the continent’s energy use. And even more starkly, more than half of the natural gas and a third of the oil consumed in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, came from Russia.
“The energy appeared cheap, but it exposed us to blackmail,” Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, which serves as the European Union’s executive branch, said at the World Economic Forum in January 2025.
In a frantic attempt to relieve Russian leverage on European politics and economics while also making major inroads toward meeting the European Union’s climate goals, EU countries have massively ramped up their renewable energy capacities, shattering records for solar and wind deployment. But it now seems that these markets may have grown too much, too quickly, and European energy markets are now reeling from the fallout.
Relying on variable energies for the bulk of a bloc’s energy mix is great for the climate, but can be dangerous for grid stability if mismanaged. Today, “the German electricity grid is today more weather dependent than ever,” reads a recent op-ed for Bloomberg. “Without sufficient baseload generation running 24/7 and dispatchable plants, which can be activated on demand, Berlin relies on imports from neighboring countries to fill the gap during long stretches of winter when it’s dark and windless.”
This, in turn, has wreaked havoc on neighboring Norway’s energy markets. As more and more of Norway’s energy flows to German grids, Norwegian energy prices are climbing ever higher for locals. Norway has cheap and abundant energy thanks to prodigious hydropower resources, and locals are none too happy about sacrificing their cheap energy prices to keep German lights on.
“Nordic countries increasingly feel they are paying the cost of a failed German energy policy — one they weren’t consulted on,” Javier Blas wrote for Bloomberg.
This discontent has led to serious fracturing in the Norwegian government. Norway, which is not part of the EU, has recently seen its coalition government collapse under the weight of deciding how to respond to EU energy measures. Norway’s Eurosceptic Centre Party has pulled out of the coalition government entirely, leaving Norway’s prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre to lead a minority government.
“The price contagion through the last two cables gives us high and unstable prices, and the EU prevents us from implementing effective measures to control electricity exports out of Norway,” said the Centre Party’s leader and finance minister Trygve Slagsvold Vedum in a statement calling for Norway to “take back national control” of electricity prices.
The Norwegian government is now considering a control mechanism to limit exports. If Norway decides to limit or completely curtail its energy flows to the European Union, it would be catastrophic for the bloc. Norway was the continent’s third biggest energy exporter last year.
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“If we lift our gaze and look forward to what is happening around the North Sea, there is a strong emphasis on renewable power from all countries,” says Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store. “But then every country has to sit down and consider what is their share of such a possibility and there is no one who is going to do something that is not in their interests.”
It is inevitable that major energy shifts will result in clashes and uncertainties like those playing out in Europe. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s part of a learning process for an unprecedented and ultimately necessary transition. Watching how European leaders resolve the tensions, reconfigure regulations, and move forward with their energy transition ambitions will offer key learnings and insights to the rest of the world as we continue to foray into the decarbonization era.
Standard Chartered analysts: Trump's assumptions about U.S. oil’s fungibility and supply elasticity are flawed.
U.S. oil production growth is expected to continue slowing, with non-OPEC supply growth staying below 1 mb/d over the next few years.
Analysts predict renewed sanctions enforcement will heavily impact Iran’s oil sector, with Trump likely tying Iranian crude restrictions to his broader China trade agenda.
An executive order signed by President Trump titled ‘Unleashing American Energy’ signed on 20 January detailed oil’s importance in restoring U.S. economic and military security. The executive order describes oil as an abundant low-cost resource that has been held back by regulations, and that can now be freed to fuel a renaissance in manufacturing thanks to the cost advantage of cheap oil.
Commodity analysts at Standard Chartered have pointed out that Trump’s view of U.S. oil hinges on several assumptions: that oil is fungible and hence, for example, substitution between foreign heavy crude refined in Illinois and light sweet Permian Basin crude is easy, and the supply curve for unconstrained U.S. oil is highly elastic with a low marginal cost. StanChart says these assumptions are flawed, arguing that the U.S. oil supply curve is likely to remain stubbornly high and steep rather than low and flat.
Last year, a survey by law firm Haynes Boone LLC revealed that banks are gearing up for oil prices to fall below $60 a barrel by the middle of Trump’s new term driven by increased U.S. output. The survey of 26 bankers showed that they expect WTI prices to drop to $58.62 a barrel by 2027, nearly $13 lower than the intraday price of $71.22 at 12.30 pm ET on Wednesday. However, StanChart has predicted that the dramatic slowdown in U.S. oil production growth that we witnessed in 2024 will continue over the next two years.
According to the experts, last year witnessed a sharp slowdown in non-OPEC+ supply growth from 2.46 mb/d in 2023 to 0.79 mb/d in 2024, primarily caused by a reduction in U.S. total liquids growth from 1.605 mb/d in 2023 to 734 kb/d in 2024. StanChart expects this trend to continue, with U.S. liquids growth expected to clock in at just 367 kb/d in 2025 before slowing down further to 151 kb/d in 2026.
Stanchart says the U.S. slowdown and a long tail of declines will keep non-OPEC supply growth well below 1 mb/d over the next couple of years despite some areas of solid growth in Brazil, Canada and Guyana. In other words, there’s no inevitable supply glut coming as many traders feared in 2024.
Stopping Iranian Oil Exports
Earlier, StanChart pointed out that that U.S. policy, and particularly the degree to which restrictions are enforced, has been the key determinant of Iranian output levels.
Indeed, the five main turning points in Iran’s output trajectory have all been associated with changes in U.S. policy. For the past three years, Iran’s exports have been allowed to climb by the Biden administration, with Washington seeing them as a price moderator after the imposition of sanctions on Russia. However, Trump’s US administration is less likely to accept any trade-offs in the enforcement of sanctions, and has vowed to drive Tehran's oil exports to zero. Well, this might not be the usual Trump bluster: Iran’s output fell from 3.8 million barrels per day (mb/d) to slightly below 2.0 mb/d in the last two years of the first Trump presidency, taking exports close to zero. StanChart says to expect similar downward pressure to be exerted in the second Trump presidency.
Last year, Trump revealed he had previously succeeded in cutting Iran’s oil exports in his first term by linking it to trade; “I told China and other countries, if you buy from Iran, we will not let you do any business in this country and we will put tariffs on every product you do send in of 100% or more.” According to StanChart, Iranian oil is likely to play a key role in Trump’s wider China trade policy agenda. China has been importing Iranian oil indirectly via proxies. According to multiple media sources, the transfers involve a dark fleet consisting of a group of aging tankers that rarely have an identifiable insurer. These transfers can be hazardous, including the danger of spills and collisions, with so many low-quality tankers massed in a narrow trade route with their transponders off. For instance, two such vessels caught fire off Singapore after a collision in July.
Iran’s oil exports started shrinking late last year after a ramp-up in sanctions by the Biden administration froze some ships that deliver Iranian oil to China via ship-to-ship oil transfers off Malaysia and Singapore. China's imports of Iranian crude oil and condensate dropped by 524,000 barrels per day (bpd) to a four-month low of 1.31 million bpd in November as the sanctions took effect.
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
Trump’s Energy Boom Leaves Australia Struggling to Compete
Woodside CEO Meg O'Neill criticizes Australia’s energy policies for delaying key projects and increasing costs.
The U.S. is attracting energy investment by cutting red tape and boosting fossil fuel production, leaving Australia behind.
Australia faces rising energy prices and increasing uncertainty as it struggles to maintain its position as a reliable energy exporter.
Woodside Energy’s CEO Meg O’Neill isn’t sugarcoating it—Australia is losing ground in the global energy race, and Donald Trump’s aggressive push to ramp up U.S. fossil fuel production is only making things worse. Speaking at the Melbourne Mining Club this week, O’Neill warned that Australia’s regulatory hurdles, environmental red tape, and high costs are pushing investment away, while the U.S. is rolling out the red carpet for energy projects, the FT has reported.
“Australia is not competing,” she said bluntly, pointing to government policies that have delayed key oil and gas projects, making it harder for the country to meet its own energy needs—never mind securing its standing as a major LNG exporter.
Meanwhile, Trump is all about cutting regulations, boosting output, and creating an investment-friendly environment that’s enticing capital away from other countries--like Australia.
The timing stinks. Australia’s energy prices are already on the rise, with some states now being forced to actually import gas--for the first time. Price caps and export controls introduced by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government have added uncertainty, making Australia look like a less reliable supplier to its key Asian customers, including Japan and South Korea.
O’Neill’s warning comes as Woodside itself looks beyond Australia. The company has been expanding into the U.S. where energy projects don’t get stuck in bureaucratic limbo for years. Case in point: Woodside has been waiting for six long years for government approval on a Western Australia project.
With Trump poised to make American energy dominance a cornerstone of his policy, Australia’s sluggish approach to development is putting its own industry—and its economy—at risk. Energy security isn’t just about keeping the lights on. It’s about staying in the game.
US President Trump has vowed to ask OPEC to ramp up production.
Lower oil prices will not only impact OPEC, it will also affect US oil producers.
OPEC has a very different agenda than Trump and is not going to do what he wants just because he asks nicely..
One of President Trump’s first orders of business following the initial burst of executive orders was to declare he would ask OPEC to ramp up its oil production to bring down prices. Trump pledged cheap energy to Americans, and he vowed to put a quick end to the Ukraine war, which, to him, would accomplish lower oil prices. Only OPEC had to agree—and it didn’t. It could be Trump’s very first reality check this term.
Trump was speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos when he said he was surprised that OPEC producers hadn’t taken care of oil prices before the U.S. election in November. “You gotta bring down the oil price,” he said. “That will end that war. You could end that war.”
While plausible on the face of it, this argument is as questionable as the argument that sanctions are working and the Russian economy is in tatters—as evidenced by a 2024 World Bank update on major economies, in which it ranked Russia among high-income countries, and on a per-capita basis, at that, for the first time since 2015.
Yet there are bigger problems with Trump’s idea of having OPEC open up the taps to help him fulfill his campaign promise of cheap energy. For starters, the Saudi Crown Prince may be Trump’s buddy, but he’s got his own priorities, and funding his Vision 2030 is number one on the list—for which he needs higher—not lower—oil prices and continued partnership with Russia.
Then there is the domestic problem: low oil prices are not what U.S. drillers want to hear or see. In fact, U.S. drillers like prices where they are and would not mind seeing them go higher. In other words, Trump’s goals of cheaper energy and more U.S. oil and gas production are at direct and quite sharp odds with OPEC’s priorities. Friendship with Crown Prince Mohammed won’t help—because OPEC doesn’t care about politics. OPEC cares about the oil market.
Amena Bakr, head of Middle East Energy and OPEC research at Kpler, recently detailed the situation with Trump and OPEC in an analysis for Semafor, where she pointed out that OPEC did not respond to Trump’s calls for more production and is unlikely to ever consider responding favorably because “at its core, it remains focused on market management, not political posturing. That includes keeping Russia firmly inside the alliance to maintain maximum clout over global supply.”
This is certainly not something that the U.S. president would be happy to hear, but there is more than one reason for OPEC’s behavior. According to Bakr, in addition to Russia’s importance for the extended group’s clout over global oil markets, there is the matter of maintaining internal cohesion and unity. As she puts it, “member states are wary of any move that could be interpreted as bowing to Trump, particularly if it risks internal fractures or threatens the alliance’s independence and loss of members.”
In other words, OPEC has a very different agenda than Trump and is not going to do what he wants just because he asks nicely. Of course, this most likely means he’ll stop asking nicely at some point, but that is unlikely to change OPEC’s tack. Especially now that it seems Trump has finally found the time to craft his policy towards Iran, which quite unsurprisingly is a return to maximum pressure, aiming to squeeze Iran’s oil exports to zero with the stated aim of preventing the country from developing a nuclear weapon.
According to the International Energy Agency, the rest of OPEC has plenty of spare capacity to cover the potential loss of Iranian barrels. Yet, as usual, the International Energy Agency is quite selective in its observations. OPEC indeed has the spare capacity to offset the loss of Iranian crude supply. What it does not appear to have is the willingness. OPEC has repeatedly demonstrated that it would not follow anyone else’s agenda but its own. This means that the cartel would only start increasing production if it is satisfied with the trajectory of international prices. It really is as simple as that.
There is also an additional challenge, as represented by OPEC’s decision to drop the U.S. Energy Information Administration from its secondary source lists—the outlets it uses to count its oil production. OPEC also dropped Rystad Energy—a formerly pure-play energy consultancy that has, over time, acquired a pro-transition bias not dissimilar to the IEA’s. As for the EIA, the significance of OPEC’s move to drop it as a secondary source of production information does not spell anything good about Trump’s relationship with the cartel.
“Opec probably now sees the EIA as a [direct] US government agency,” one former OPEC official told the Financial Times. “Its numbers were not particularly different from the other monitors, perhaps a little bit higher on the UAE’s production,” the official added, noting that “No one really believes the monthly Opec outlook [production numbers] at this point, though.” Yet they probably would believe energy data analysts such as Kpler, OilX, and ESAI, which OPEC is taking on as secondary sources.
Trump’s relationship with OPEC, then, is going to be rather complicated during his second term. The sooner the new U.S. administration acknowledges the realities of the situation, the easier it will be to cultivate a new relationship on a more equal footing.
Hydropower, the leading source of renewable energy, is facing significant challenges due to climate change-induced droughts and environmental concerns.
Droughts have decreased hydropower production in several regions, leading to power shortages and economic losses.
While hydropower is crucial for clean energy development, especially in regions like Africa, its expansion faces hurdles due to environmental impacts and high upfront costs.
Hydropower is the world’s single largest source of green energy. On a global scale, hydropower plants produce more energy than all other renewable power sources combined. However, the growth rate of new hydropower capacity has tapered off in recent years, and the sector is plagued by serious current and future problems, from increased incidents and intensity of droughts in a changing climate, and major negative environmental externalities associated with mega-dams.
Hydropower offers a critical benefit that other renewable energies don’t. It creates energy around the clock unlike solar and wind energy, which are dependent on weather patterns and therefore highly variable. For this reason, hydropower is an extremely attractive option for river-endowed nations that want to boost their clean energy production levels without compromising grid stability or energy security. But in recent years, investment in expanded hydro has dropped off.
“In the last five years the average growth rate was less than one-third of what is required, signaling a need for significantly stronger efforts, especially to streamline permitting and ensure project sustainability,” the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported last year. “Hydropower plants should be recognised as a reliable backbone of the clean power systems of the future and supported accordingly.”
But in recent years hydropower has not proved to be as reliant as its investors had hoped. Widespread droughts associated with climate change have caused rivers to run lower or even dry up entirely, causing seriously negative (literal) downstream effects for hydropower production plants. In 2022, intense droughts in China’s Yangtze River basin slashed developed hydropower potential (DHP) by 26%, causing critical shortages and spurring an uptick in coal-fired power production. In the last few years similar problems have cropped up in Brazil, Ecuador, the United States, and the Mediterranean region, too. Critically, these are not isolated or one-off incidents; the risk of similar extreme droughts in the future rises by nearly 90% in a number of climate change scenarios, notably SSP585.
“Since September, daily energy cuts have lasted as long as 14 hours,” the New York Times recently reported from Quito, Ecuador. “Highways have turned an inky black; entire neighborhoods have lost running water, even internet and cell service.” Not only does this have enormous implications for day-to-day life, these blackouts reverberate through the national economy. It is estimated that for every hour of blackout, Ecuador loses $12 million in productivity and sales.
Climate scenarios are just one of the factors deterring investors away from new hydropower mega-projects. In the United States, investments in large hydropower plants all but drief up due to the simple fact that “there are no suitable river locations in the US for new ones,” according to recent reporting from CleanTechnica. And the ones that do exist are associated with major ecological disruptions, changing flood patterns and blocking salmon runs for tens of millions of fish, among other environmental issues.
“There are certainly rivers in other countries which could be tapped using conventional hydropower technology, but not in the US,” Frederick Hasler wrote for CleanTechnica. “Going forward, current US hydro needs to be maintained, but cannot be significantly increased.”
And there are indeed major projects being planned in the rivers of other countries, but these are not without their own problems. In the Congo, plans for the world’s largest hydropower project have been stalled for years after much enthusiasm at the outset. Some blame the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s poor governance for the Grand Inga dam’s failure to launch, while others point to a revolving door of international partners, a blisteringly high up-front cost of around $80 billion in one of the world’s poorest nations, and “deep concerns about the project's environmental and social impact” according to reporting from the BBC.
But the need for the Grand Inga is enormous and impossible to ignore. Around 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to power completely, making electrification a critical step for economic and social development in the region. But Africa does not have the luxury of emitting greenhouse gases indiscriminately as the developed world has done over the past 150 years. Instead, the continent is under enormous international pressure to “leapfrog” over fossil fuels and straight to the development of clean energy systems. It’s hard to imagine how this will be possible without large-scale hydropower.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
Africa Could Withhold Critical Minerals After Trump Cuts Aid
The Trump administration has dismantled much of the U.S. Agency for International Development, affecting a large number of African countries.
China has significantly boosted investment a number of African countries over the last decades.
The U.S. is likely to struggle to secure the continent’s vast mineral resources under the Trump administration.
Last year, a report by the United States Institute Of Peace (USIP) emphasized the importance of the United States government engaging in the African critical minerals sector if it is to diminish its dependence on China and fortify its national security and foreign policy interests. The report outlines practical steps that the United States can take to build mineral partnerships with African countries in a bid to diversify its supply chains and strengthen peace and security on the continent. Africa is home to an estimated 20% of global copper and aluminium reserves, 50% of manganese and cobalt, 90% of platinum group metals, 36% of chromium, as well as considerable lithium, uranium, gold and rare earths. However, the U.S. is likely to struggle to secure the continent’s vast mineral resources under the Trump administration. South Africa's Resources Minister Gwede Mantashe says Africa should withhold minerals from the United States if Trump cuts aid, "If they don't give us money, let's not give them minerals. We are not just beggars," Mantashe told the African Mining Conference in Cape Town. "We cannot continue to debate these minerals based on the dictates of some developed nations as if we have no aspirations to accelerate Africa's industrialisation and close the development deficit," Mantashe said.
The Trump administration, led by billionaire ally Elon Musk, has dismantled much of the U.S. Agency for International Development, shutting down a six-decade mission intended to shore up U.S. security by educating children, fighting epidemics and advancing other development abroad. Trump declared on Truth Social that he would be ‘cutting off all future funding to South Africa’ until an investigation into the Land Expropriation Act is done. He called the act ‘a massive human rights violation’ and accused the South African government of ‘confiscating land and treating certain classes of people very badly.’
China Locking In Africa
Given this backdrop, it’s likely that China will come out on top in the race to secure African minerals. Over the past couple of decades, China has been all over Africa, building railroads, airports, bridges, and power dams, doing what Africa’s colonial masters should have done eons ago. Trade between China and Africa has surged dramatically from US$1 billion in 1980 to US$282 billion in 2023 while cumulative loans to African governments hit US$182 billion between 2002 and 2023, making China Africa’s largest bilateral creditor. China’s lending to African countries has particularly skyrocketed under the massive Belt and Road Initiative.
The bulk of Chinese investments are concentrated in Angola and Nigeria where they are closely linked to their respective oil industries. China has, however, lately been changing tact, cozying up to mineral-rich countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo to the chagrin of oil-rich ones like Angola and Nigeria. Beijing has written off $28 million in loans by the DRC and provided it with US$17 million in other financial support. China Molybdenum, owner of the world’s second-largest cobalt mine in the DRC, purchased the undeveloped Kisanfu resource from Freeport McMoRan for US$550 million. China Nonferrous Metal Mining Corporation (CNMC) is actively operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), primarily focused on developing copper and cobalt mining projects, most notably through a joint venture with the state-owned mining company Gécamines at the Deziwa mine and the Lualaba copper smelter; making them a significant player in the DRC's copper sector. Meanwhile, the likes of Chengtun Mining, Huayou Cobalt and Wanbao are busy staking their claims in the Central African nation.
A cross-section of experts have, however, taken a dim view of China’s rapidly growing investments in Africa with some accusing China of burdening the continent with debt in projects designed to lock in Africa.
“Even though they are financed with Chinese loans and built with Chinese contractors and labor, most of these projects are designed to lock African countries into a long-term political and diplomatic relationship with China rather than to make money,” says Ted Bauman, senior research analyst and economist at Banyan Hill Publishing.
Bauman says China can use the diplomatic relationship, for instance, to gain Africa’s votes on sensitive matters, like the Taiwan and the South China Sea issues. He says that evidence suggests that China is using state-funded energy infrastructure projects for Chinese corporate domination of African energy companies, something that could prove to be disadvantageous for their African partners especially if Beijing starts leveraging lower prices for exports of African oil to China.
Meanwhile, former U.S. Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, criticized China's lending policy to Africa saying it "encouraged dependency, utilised corrupt deals and endangered its natural resources"
By Alex Kimani for Oilprice.com
Pipeline Upgrades Could Boost Trans Mountain’s Capacity by 300,000 Bpd
Canada’s Trans Mountain pipeline could boost its capacity by up to 300,000 barrels per day (bpd) with upgrade projects, but it is not considering a third line, Trans Mountain Corporation’s Vice President Jason Balasch has said.
The Trans Mountain pipeline, which currently has a capacity to carry 890,000 bpd of crude and products from Alberta to the Pacific Coast, explores solutions to increase capacity and flows by potentially using drag-reducing agents to ease flows and add more pumps, Balasch told Reuters on the sidelines of an oil industry conference in Houston, Texas.
Last year, the Trans Mountain pipeline finally completed its expansion – after years of delays – and tripled the capacity of the original pipeline to 890,000 bpd from 300,000 bpd to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands to British Columbia.
The expanded pipeline provides increased transportation capacity for Canadian producers to get their oil out of Alberta and into the Pacific Coast and then to the U.S. West Coast or Asian markets.
Increased access for Canadian oil producers to markets other than the U.S. comes just in time as President Trump’s threat of U.S. tariffs on Canada, and a levy of 10% on its energy exports to the United States, is rattling the North American oil markets.
“I think there's a lot of Asian markets that we could access,” Balasch, who is Vice President in charge of Business Development and Commercial Services at Trans Mountain Corporation, told Reuters.
“Our system isn't full and we're confident we can operate it to its maximum,” the executive added.
Since the threats of U.S. tariffs on Canada began, Trans Mountain Corporation has seen an increase in inquiries from new potential shippers, Balasch told Reuters.
Trans Mountain’s utilization rates were already rising before President Trump took office, said the executive.
Balasch also expects a further increase in pipeline utilization and more tankers to load from Canada to overseas markets when the Port of Vancouver introduces upgrades in its navigation systems to allow nighttime travel of unloaded tankers, expected in Q3.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
Indoor Marijuana Ops Are Consuming a Staggering Amount of Energy
Indoor marijuana growing operations in the U.S. use more energy than all outdoor agriculture combined.
The high energy consumption is due to lighting, temperature control, and the current legal framework requiring in-state production.
Despite awareness of the issue, no significant action has been taken to reduce the marijuana industry's energy footprint.
More than a decade after Colorado became the first U.S. state to legalize recreational marijuana, nearly half (24) of states now have legal recreational weed, and 39 allow medical marijuana use. The country is awash in cannabis. A staggering 79% of Americans live in a county with at least one dispensary. In 2025, the domestic cannabis industry is expected to reach nearly $45 billion, and over three million kilograms of cannabis will be consumed.
As the cannabis industry balloons and cannabis products become ever-more potent, the industry is receiving increasing scrutiny in terms of its impact on human health. Just this week, NPR published a report about contaminants in legal marijuana due to patchy regulation, and scientific reports studying marijuana users have come out indicating links between heavy marijuana consumption and decreased brain activity, adverse effects on memory, and increased incidence of schizophrenia.
But virtually no attention has been paid to the environmental effects of the legal cannabis boom. And, as it turns out, this is a major oversight. Indoor cannabis cultivation – which represents two-thirds of the domestic marijuana growing industry – uses more energy than all outdoor agriculture in the entire United States combined. By another metric, growing four pounds of cannabis at an indoor facility can consume the same amount of electricity as the average American home uses in an entire year.
Evan Mills at Energy Associates, a consultancy in California, calculates that together, legal and illegal marijuana growing operations use a whopping 596 petajoules per year in the United States. “Consumers are led to believe that this is ‘nature’s medicine’ and that it’s ‘green’ in every sense of the word,” says Mills. “There’s lots of greenwashing.”
Indoor marijuana growing operations do not only use more energy than outdoor agriculture – they also consume a whole lot more energy than other indoor agriculture. Growing cannabis indoors requires 40 times more energy than growing lettuce, for example. A typical indoor grow operation can consume as much as 2,000 watts of electricity per square meter. This is in part because of the lighting and temperature control needs of marijuana crops. But it’s also thanks to the United States’ legal approach to marijuana production and transport.
The staggering energy use of marijuana growing operations in the United States is largely thanks to the same patchwork legislative approach that NPR blamed this week for unwelcome contaminants in your legally purchased cannabis. Legislation that makes crossing state lines with marijuana illegal means that each state must grow its own marijuana crop, which in turn “deprives them of the scale that makes other industries more efficient,” according to reporting from Politico.
Scientists and policymakers have been aware of the irresponsible scale of energy use by the marijuana industry for years. Nearly a decade ago, the National Conference of State Legislatures published a brief on the then-nascent industry which found that “the average electricity consumption of a 5,000-square-foot indoor facility in Boulder County was 41,808 kilowatt-hours per month, while an average household in the county used about 630 kilowatt hours.” The report went on to say that the lighting used in these operations is comparable to that in a hospital operating room. That means they’re 500 times brighter than recommended reading light levels.
But despite more than a decade of research on the issue, no meaningful action has been taken to curb energy consumption in the sector. As a result, the greenhouse gas footprint of legal marijuana growing operations is huge, and expanding. Major federal policy changes will be necessary to curb this issue, but this poses a major legislative challenge, as marijuana remains illegal at the federal level. However, in an era of rapdily increasing energy demand from data centers and increasingly tight supply, tackling such needless waste becomes increasingly critical for the country’s energy security – a bipartisan priority.
Fleet Space, Australia’s leading space exploration company, has been awarded a Moon to Mars supply chain grant by the Australian Government to develop advanced gravity sensing technology. This initiative, part of the Australian Space Agency’s Moon to Mars Supply Chain Capability Improvement Program, aims to enhance in-situ resource exploration on the Moon and Mars by building critical technological capabilities for future space missions.
Blue Ghost Lunar Lander. Image Credit: Firefly Aerospace
Earth urgently needs next-generation, off-world exploration technologies to maximize the value of every mission to the Moon and Mars over the coming years. A vital part of optimizing the ROI of every un-manned or manned mission depends on miniaturized, rapidly deployable, and highly scalable exploration technologies that can rapidly gather high-quality subsurface data from the landing site to identify and build a viable base of operations.
Matt Pearson, Co-Founder and Chief Exploration Officer, Fleet Space
A comparable approach has already been demonstrated on Earth. Fleet Space’s ExoSphere technology, in collaboration with MIT Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, was used to deliver real-time 3D imaging of lava tubes in the Canary Islands.
Pearson added, “Leveraging Fleet Space’s terrestrial end-to-end mineral exploration platform, ExoSphere, as a blueprint - we have created a model for a hyper-scalable, off-world exploration system designed to operate at the planetary level. As we venture deeper into our solar system, the essential toolkit of exploration technologies must be integrated into a single system to streamline deployment, reduce costs, optimize mission planning, and enhance off-world decision making for the success and safety of all future explorers of new worlds.”
This advanced MEMS gravity sensor builds on Fleet Space’s previous innovation: a lunar variant of the smart seismic sensors that power ExoSphere’s real-time 3D imaging capabilities. These sensors are already used by leading mining companies such as Rio Tinto, Barrick, and Gold Fields. The next major milestone will be the deployment of Fleet Space’s miniaturized smart seismic station, SPIDER, on Firefly Aerospace’s second Blue Ghost mission in 2026. Delivered via the Blue Ghost lunar lander, SPIDER will help unlock new insights into the Moon’s subsurface composition.
The development of MEMS gravity sensors follows a similar trajectory, aiming to simplify and accelerate the collection of high-quality gravity data both on Earth and in space.
Building on the rapid adoption of ExoSphere across the global mining industry, Fleet Space recently closed a USD $100M Series D funding round, reaching a valuation of USD $525M. To further expand its proprietary low-Earth orbit (LEO) exploration satellite network, the company launched its most advanced Centauri 7 and Centauri 8 models aboard SpaceX’s Transporter 12 mission.
Temperamental stars are distorting our view of distant planets
Second author Alex Thompson’s artistic representation of the HAT-P-11 system of which multiple observations were used in this study. The HAT-P-11 system consists of a cool host star that is much ‘spottier’ than our Sun orbited by a misaligned, transiting ‘super-Neptune’ HAT-P-11b and a non-transiting Jupiter-mass planet HAT-P-11c
Most of the information we have about planets beyond our solar system (exoplanets) comes from looking at dips in starlight as these planets pass in front of their host star.
This technique can give clues about the planet’s size (by looking at how much starlight is blocked) and what its atmosphere is made of (by looking at how the planet changes the pattern of starlight that passes through it).
But a new study, published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, concluded that fluctuations in the starlight due to hotter and colder regions on a star’s surface may be distorting our interpretations of planets more than we previously thought.
The researchers looked at the atmospheres of 20 Jupiter- and Neptune-sized planets and found that the host stars’ changeability distorted the data for about half of them.
If researchers did not properly account for these variations, the team said, they could misinterpret a range of features such as the planets’ size, temperature and the composition of their atmospheres. The team added that the risk of misinterpretation was manageable if researchers looked at a range of wavelengths of light, including in the optical region where effects of stellar contamination are most apparent.
Lead author Dr Arianna Saba (UCL Physics & Astronomy), who did the work as part of her PhD at UCL, said: “These results were a surprise – we found more stellar contamination of our data than we were expecting. This is important for us to know. By refining our understanding of how stars’ variability might affect our interpretations of exoplanets, we can improve our models and make smarter use of the much bigger datasets to come from missions including James Webb, Ariel and Twinkle.”
Second author Alexandra (Alex) Thompson, a current PhD student at UCL Physics & Astronomy whose research focuses on exoplanet host stars, said: “We learn about exoplanets from the light of their host stars and it is sometimes hard to disentangle what is a signal from the star and what is coming from the planet.
“Some stars might be described as ‘patchy’ – they have a greater proportion of colder regions, which are darker, and hotter regions, which are brighter, on their surface. This is due to stronger magnetic activity.
“Hotter, brighter regions (faculae) emit more light and so, for instance, if a planet passes in front of the hottest part of the star, this might lead researchers to over-estimate how large the planet is, as it will seem to block out more of the star’s light, or they might infer the planet is hotter than it is or has a denser atmosphere. The reverse is true if the planet passes in front of a cold starspot, making the planet appear ‘smaller’.
“On the other hand, the reduction in emitted light from a starspot could even mimic the effect of a planet passing in front of a star, leading you to think there might be a planet when there is none. This is why follow up observations are so important to confirm exoplanet detections.
“These variations from the star can also distort estimates of how much water vapour, for instance, is in a planet’s atmosphere. That is because the variations can mimic or obscure the signature of water vapour in the pattern of light at different wavelengths that reaches our telescopes.”
For the study, researchers used 20 years of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, combining data from two of the telescope’s instruments, the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) and the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).
They processed and analysed the data for each planet in an identical way, to ensure they were comparing like with like, minimising the biases that occur when datasets are processed using different methods.
The team then looked at which combination of atmospheric and stellar models fit their data the best, comparing models that accounted for stellar variability with simpler models that did not. They found that data for six planets out of the 20 analysed had a better fit with models adjusted for stars’ variability and six other planets may have experienced minor contamination from their host star.
They analysed light at visible, near-infrared and near-ultraviolet wavelengths, using the fact that distortions from stellar activity are much more apparent in the near-UV and visible (optical) region than at longer wavelengths in the infrared.
The team described two ways to judge if stellar variability might be affecting planetary data.
Dr Saba explained: “One is to look at the overall shape of the spectrum – that is, the pattern of light at different wavelengths that has passed through the planet from the star – to see if this can be explained by the planet alone or if stellar activity is needed. The other is to have two observations of the same planet in the optical region of the spectrum that are taken at different times. If these observations are very different, the likely explanation is variable stellar activity.”
Alex Thompson added: "The risk of misinterpretation is manageable with the right wavelength coverage. Shorter wavelength, optical observations such as those used in this study are particularly helpful, as this is where stellar contamination effects are most apparent."
A new paper released today documents the first soil, airfall dust, and rock fragment samples collected by NASA for return from Mars. We checked in with the UNLV astrobiologist leading the specimen selection team for intel on what the samples so far reveal.
To date, the only objects from Mars that humans possess are meteorites that crash landed here on Earth. Thanks to NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Mission, scientists for the first time in history are able to retrieve handpicked samples — ranging from rock cores the size of a piece of blackboard chalk, to collections of fragmented rocks the dimensions of a pencil eraser and miniscule grains of sand or dust that could fit on the tip of a needle.
Percy, as the rover is nicknamed, launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. in July 2020, and arrived in February 2021 at Jezero Crater — a 28-mile-wide former lakebed selected for its potential to help scientists understand the story of Mars’ wet past. The yearslong mission seeks to determine whether Mars ever supported life, understand the processes and history of Mars’ climate, explore the origin and evolution of Mars as a geologic system, and prepare for human exploration.
The specimens are currently slated for return to Earth sometime in the mid-to late-2030s. In the meantime, NASA has so far collected 28 of the mission’s target of 43 samples.
“The samples will help us learn more about Mars, but they can also help us learn more about Earth because the surface of Mars is generally much older than the surface of Earth,” said UNLV College of Sciences professor Libby Hausrath, an aqueous geochemist who investigates interactions between water and minerals.
She’s a member of the NASA Mars Sample Return team that helps determine which specimens the rover will bring back to Earth for inspection by powerful lab equipment too large to send to Mars. She’s also the lead author of a new research article published in the American Geophysical Union/Wiley journal JGR Planets documenting the first soil samples collected.
“There are many possibilities for spinoff technologies used for space exploration that can then be used on Earth,” Hausrath added. “And one of the biggest benefits we get from the space program is that it’s exciting for students and children, and can help attract people into science – we need all the future scientists to help with science topics like these and others.”
The project fulfills a decades-long dream for Hausrath, who fell in love with Mars while pursuing her Ph.D. and partnered with an advisor to write a proposal to work with data from NASA’s Spirit and Opportunity rovers.
“This was one of my career goals for a long time to be able to serve on a Mars mission, so I was really excited to have this opportunity,” Hausrath said. “It really is just incredible the level of detail and precision that the Perseverance rover has. To get the data back and be able to target a specific rock or soil area, and be able to take measurements and decipher information from a tiny sample or specks of dust on another planet is just mind blowing.”
Why Scientists Care
Unlike Earth, Mars doesn’t have plate tectonics constantly shifting and tilting the planet’s surface. Similar to the way scientists study a tree’s rings or examine a cave’s stalactites for historical climate pattern changes, researchers are able to glean information about Mars’ 4 billion-year-old existence by using the rover’s instruments to core rocks and dig soil samples for clues to the history of Mars, including possible signs of past life.
Examining the rocks’ geochemistry and airfall dust also has the potential to shed light on how Mars’ climate heats and cools and its relative temperature. This information may also tip off how the planet formed, reveal clues about the early solar system, and help pinpoint the time period when life arose on Earth.
“During early Mars history, the planet is believed to have been warmer and had liquid water, which is much different than its current environment, which is very windy, dry, and cold,” said Hausrath. “I’m really interested in water and what kinds of environments can be habitable. And Mars, in particular, is quite similar to Earth in lots of ways. If there was past life on Mars, we might be able to see signatures of it.”
The mission also serves as a de facto scouting mission that could unlock clues about the similarities or challenges that humans might face during future trips to the Red Planet. To highlight the importance of recon, Hausrath recounted the experience of the first astronauts on the moon.
“The lunar regolith is actually really sharp so it was cutting holes in the astronauts’ spacesuits, which is something scientists hadn’t anticipated,” she said. “There’s a lot of dust and sand on Mars’ surface, and bringing back samples is of great interest and value to scientists to figure out how future human astronauts could interact with the particles swirling in the air or potentially use it for building materials.”
How the Rover Works
Percy boasts a cache of futuristic instruments that scientists can manipulate from millions of miles away. It can measure chemistry and mineralogy by shooting a laser from a distance of several meters. It has proximity instruments that can measure fine-scale elements. Researchers use the rover’s wheels to make trenches allowing them to see below the planet’s surface. Science, engineering, and navigational cameras transport images back to Earth.
“It’s like a video game to see these images of Mars up close,” said Hausrath. “You can zoom in, see the rocks and soil, pick out a spot to measure, figure out the chemistry and mineralogy of a specific rock – it's just incredible that we’re able to do these things that seem like they’re out of science fiction.”
Hausrath is one of the team’s tactical science leads. During daily meetings, members collaborate on instructions to send back to the rover for collection.
“There are some instruments that just can’t be miniaturized and sent to Mars,” Hausrath said, “so once the samples are back on Earth, we’ll have much finer resolution, be able to measure smaller amounts of each of the samples and with higher precision, and look at things like trace metals and isotopes.”
Until then, the samples are being held on Mars in small tubes and are either being stored on the rover or at the Three Forks depot, a swath of flat ground near the base of an ancient river delta that formed long ago when it flowed into a lake on the planet’s Jezero Crater. Scientists mapped an intricate layout, so that they can be found even if buried under layers of dust.
Eventually, they’ll be retrieved by a robotic lander that’ll use a robotic arm to carefully pluck the tubes into a containment capsule aboard a small rocket that’ll ship them to yet another spacecraft for the long ride home to Earth.
What the Rocks Reveal
On Earth, life is found nearly everywhere there’s water. And the Percy team is on a mission to find out if the same was true for Mars billions of years ago, when the planet’s climate was much more like ours. The rock and soil samples are being pulled from the once water-rich Jezero crater as well as the crater rim — a swath laden with clay minerals, which result from rock-water interactions and look similar to soils on Earth.
Until the samples are back on Earth, scientists won’t be able to say for sure whether they contain traces of microorganisms that may have once thrived on the Red Planet. But so far, there are strong indicators that bolster previous predictions about water flowing freely on Mars an estimated 2 billion years ago.
Percy’s cameras show that the surface crust differs from the soil below, with larger pebbles on top versus finer grains below the surface. Some particles are coarse and weathered, evidence that they likely touched water and thus are a sign of habitable environments in the past. Atmospheric measurements provide signs of recent processes likely including water vapor in soil crust formation.
The bedrock is abundant with olivine, a mineral also found in Mars meteorites. Olivine can undergo serpentinization — a process that occurs when olivine interacts with water and heat — which on Earth indicates the potential for habitability.
But perhaps the most exciting find (and one of Hausrath’s personal favorites) is a rock with “leopard spots” nicknamed “Cheyava Falls,” after a Grand Canyon waterfall. The rock contains phosphate, which is of interest to scientists because it’s a major building block of life on Earth — from energy metabolism and cell membranes to DNA and rNA.
Analysis continues. And the NASA team is looking forward to collaborating with the European Space Agency (ESA), which plans to launch its rover, the Rosalind Franklin, in 2028. It’ll carry equipment to Mars capable of drilling 200 cm below the surface — much deeper than Percy's 4-6 cm drill.
“That would probably get beneath the effects of radiation, so we’d be able to see things we haven’t seen before potentially if there were traces of organic molecules in the past on Mars,” Hausrath said.
The Journey Back Home
NASA, in partnership with ESA, is currently slated to bring the specimen tubes home sometime between 2035 and 2039. When the samples cross back into Earth’s orbit, their first stop will be a receiving facility where they’ll be carefully inspected to determine whether they’re safe for release to researchers. The overall cache of 43 rock and soil samples will include five witness tubes to test for potential contamination.
“Planetary protection is top of mind for the mission — making sure Mars is protected from us and that we’re also protected potentially from Mars,” Hausrath said. “The goal is maintaining safety from the samples in case there’s any concerns for human hazards and also preventing any contamination from us impacting the samples.”
After clearance, she said, researchers around the world will be able to request pieces of these “international treasures” for study, similar to the current program for accessing Mars meteorites.
“One of the really cool things about the mission is that it is so international and the samples are really a global effort,” Hausrath said. “It’s really great for us to work together to bring these samples back for this goal that benefits all of us.”
Measurements and data collected from space can be used to better understand life on Earth.
An ambitious, multinational research project funded by NASA and co-led by UC Merced civil and environmental engineering Professor Erin Hestir demonstrated that Earth’s biodiversity can be monitored and measured from space, leading to a better understanding of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Hestir led the team alongside University of Buffalo geography Professor Adam Wilson and Professor Jasper Slingsby from the University of Cape Town on BioSCape, which collected data over six weeks in late 2024.
Two NASA aircraft and one South African aircraft flew over South Africa’s Greater Cape Floristic Region —one of the most biodiverse places on the planet — to collect ultraviolet, visual, thermal and other images. That data, combined with field work by the large team of scientists from the United States and South Africa, provides a comprehensive look at the region's biodiversity, or life systems.
“This was NASA’s first ever biodiversity-focused campaign,” Hestir said. “We successfully hit all our measurement targets, and the data collected are contributing to novel techniques and methods to be able to monitor biodiversity from space across the globe. It’s a lot of exciting science.”
Wilson said BioSCape showed what scientists working across continents can do, and he hopes it can be replicated elsewhere.
“Over just six weeks, more than 160 scientists from around the world came together to collect and analyze data across terrestrial, marine and freshwater ecosystems in one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.”
Once researchers proved they could collect the data they were looking for from planes, NASA could use the novel combinations of instruments to expand the effort worldwide.
“It’s very expensive to launch a satellite into space,” Slingsby explained. “You have to be certain it will achieve its mission before taking that step. That’s why we begin with airborne studies — they serve as a critical proving ground. If we can successfully gather data from a plane, it brings us one step closer to understanding how to achieve the same from space.”
The team chose the Greater Cape Region of South Africa because it’s home to “astonishing levels of biodiversity, wicked conservation challenges and a well-developed and progressive biodiversity research and conservation community,” they wrote.
The tools they developed helped them examine shifting community composition; ecosystem disturbance, resilience and recovery; and ecosystem function and nature’s contributions to people.
Addressing biodiversity loss is a global priority and there is a clear need to improve scientists’ ability to map and monitor change. The researchers made the data freely available to scientists and the public around the world. Their hope is that the methods they developed and insights they found will help shape new technologies for measuring land and sea ecosystems and ultimately improve biodiversity conservation.
They are excited to see what comes next.
“BioSCape is building technical capacity in South Africa and we hope to prepare the community to take advantage of NASA’s advanced and freely available satellite imagery to improve conservation,” said Anabelle Cardoso, the science team manager.
“In a year from now we will have new findings and better insights,” Hestir said, “advancing cutting-edge technology so we can measure life on Earth from space.”
