** The Senate and House cleared bills on Thursday to revoke normal trade relations with Russia and ban oil imports from the country, a one-two punch that caps three weeks of negotiations over legislation to further isolate Moscow.
** Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia raised fresh concerns this week about phasing out gas-powered cars in favor of electric vehicles, potentially dealing a blow to a major Democratic climate goal and setting up another hurdle for Democrats trying to win over his vote on a smaller clean energy and healthcare bill.
** The amount of heat-trapping methane emissions in the atmosphere from oil and gas wells, landfills, livestock operations and other sources worldwide saw a record increase between 2020 and 2021, according to a new federal report.
** A federal appeals court gives Baltimore a win in its climate lawsuit against fossil fuel companies by sending the case back to state court.
** California’s energy commission offers up to $23 million to organizations to install 5,000 electric vehicle chargers in the southern part of the state.
** The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said it granted Sempra Energy an extension to build two pipelines in Texas and Louisiana to connect to a Texas liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant, and NextDecade Corp is also seeking more time to build a Texas LNG project.
** The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported that domestic natural-gas supplies fell by 33 billion cubic feet for the week ended April 1. That compared with an average weekly decline of 27 billion forecast by analysts surveyed by S&P Global Commodity Insights.
World
** Puerto Rico is gradually recovering from an island-wide power outage that started on Wednesday evening. However, hundreds of thousands of people still lack electricity as the territory continues to struggle with its fragile power grid. The outage was the result of a failed circuit breaker at Costa Sur power plant.
** Germany is facing pressure to cut Russian gas supplies off, and there are concerns the Kremlin could halt supplies. Russia accounted for 55% of Germany’s natural-gas imports in 2021 and 40% in the first quarter of 2022.
** Lithuania says it has cut itself off entirely of gas imports from Russia, apparently becoming the first of the European Union’s 27 nations using Russian gas to break its energy dependence upon Moscow.
** The European Union nations have agreed to ban Russian coal in the first sanctions on the vital energy industry over the war in Ukraine, but it has underlined the 27 countries’ inability to agree so far on a much more sweeping embargo on oil and natural gas that would hit Russia harder but risk recession at home.