Energy news in brief

**  Nissan Motor Co said on Friday it has reached a breakthrough in achieving a 50% thermal efficiency with its in-development e-POWER hybrid technology, which could lead to a further reduction of car CO2 emissions.

** Elon Musk has had it with nickel. It’s scarce and expensive, so the chief executive officer of electric-carmaker Tesla tweeted on Thursday that the company’s shifting some cars to a type of battery that uses iron instead reported Bloomberg.

** Reports suggest that China’s oil stockpiles have risen to around 100 days worth of net imports, making it increasingly challenging to find extra storage tanks and facilities to hold supplies.

** Norway’s $1.3 trillion wealth fund expects to keep its existing fossil-fuel holdings as the world’s biggest sovereign investor bets it can bring about change from within the industry to fight carbon emissions. A spokesman said the fund has no further plans to exist fossil fuels after blacklisting 15 companies last year.

** U.S. Sen. John Kennedy apologized on Thursday for calling President Joe Biden’s Interior Department nominee, Deb Haaland, a “whack job.“ The Louisiana Republican said he regretted the remark about Haaland, explaining that he was searching for another word before calling her “a neo-socialist, left-of-Lenin whack job.”

**  Petroleos Mexicanos had its first back-to-back quarterly gains in four years as the weakening of the peso boosted the value of its dollar-denominated crude.

** Colorado lawmakers propose a new authority to oversee transmission lines and a regional energy compact to improve grid resilience in response to the Texas blackouts.

** Two North Dakota counties enact drastic restrictions on wind energy in an attempt to save coal mining jobs.

** Iowa regulators will meet with utilities next month to decide whether companies can take more time to recoup costs following natural gas price spikes to soften the effect on consumers.

** The Delaware River Basin Commission — a federal interstate agency that oversees four Northeastern states and represents more than 13 million people — voted on Thursday to ban fracking in the basin after a multiyear push from environmental advocates reported POLITICO.