Energy news in brief

** Three ships carrying ethanol were heading to China from the U.S. Gulf Coast, three trade sources told Reuters on Monday, in a sign that exports of the fuel were sharply increasing from the United States to the country.

** The Biden administration on Monday scrapped a controversial Trump-era legal opinion that gutted protections for hundreds of species of migratory birds. In a statement Monday, an Interior Department spokesperson said the Trump administration’s rollback “allowed industry to kill birds with impunity.”

** Canada’s natural resources minister says the country is preparing to “invoke whatever measures we need” to keep Line 5 operating in the Straits of Mackinac, which he called “nonnegotiable.”

** Nearly 400 environmental and tribal rights groups demand that President Biden halt construction on the Line 3 pipeline, calling it an “urgent threat” to Minnesota waters.

** FedEx announced this week it plans to have its entire fleet of delivery trucks by electric models and zero-emission vehicles by 2040.

** A group of 17 U.S. House of Representatives Democrats introduced legislation on Monday to provide $6 billion to the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) to buy tens of thousands of additional electric delivery vehicles.

** U.S. senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota urge the Biden administration to deploy $13 billion in targeted aid for the biofuels industry that was included in a December stimulus bill.

** Plans for a new wind energy industry in waters off the US east coast have taken a significant step forward after the Biden administration finished a long-awaited environmental study of the first project to be proposed at commercial scale. Vineyard Wind’s 62 turbines would stand 15 miles south of the island of Martha’s Vineyard and sell electricity to utilities in Massachusetts.

** Iran has quietly moved record amounts of crude oil to top client China in recent months, while India’s state refiners have added Iranian oil to their annual import plans on the assumption that U.S. sanctions on the OPEC supplier will soon ease, according to six industry sources and Refinitiv data.

** Tesla is secretly building a gigantic battery — big enough to power 20,000 homes on a hot summer day — that will connect to Texas’ grid.

** The undetected leak of 800 gallons of crude oil last year at a Mississippi storage site proves “there is no such thing as a safe oil pipeline,” said environmental group Southern Environmental Law Center.