** Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the Senate’s key swing vote, met with lawmakers from across the ideological spectrum Monday evening as part of a new push for bipartisan climate change legislation.
** The Biden administration finalized a rule aimed at phasing out inefficient lightbulbs, reversing a Trump-era policy. The new standards, which ban the production and sale of new bulbs that do not emit a certain level of light per watt of electricity, are expected to phase out most incandescent and halogen bulbs.
** House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) introduced legislation on Tuesday that aims to reform mining practices on public lands reported The Hill.
** Kinder Morgan, the Houston-based midstream company is working on commercializing an expansion of compression technology that could increase the capacity of its Permian Basin pipelines by 1.2 billion cubic feet per day, executives said.
** The Department of Energy has issued a conditional commitment backed by up to $504.4 million in debt financing for the joint venture to create the world’s largest industrial green hydrogen production and storage facility between Advanced Clean Energy Storage Project, which is expected to start operating in 2025, Mitsubishi Power Americas Inc., and Magnum Development.
** An Australian company’s Louisiana subsidiary can get up to $107 million in U.S. Department of Energy loans to expand a plant that produces materials for electric car batteries the department said Monday. The loan to Syrah Technologies LLC would be the Biden administration’s second clean energy loan.
** The price of batteries has plummeted since 2010, but electric vehicles are getting more expensive due to other supply chain problems and automakers’ focus on top-of-the-line models.
World
** Russia’s largest state-run oil producer, Rosneft PJSC, failed to sell 37 million barrels of its flagship Urals crude, traders told Reuters, as European traders continue to look elsewhere for energy products amid war in Ukraine.
** Germany is preparing for a change of control at the PCK refinery in Schwedt operated by Russian state-owned Rosneft which accounts for all of Germany’s remaining Russian oil imports, Economy Minister Robert Habeck said on Wednesday.
** Russia turned off its gas supplies to both Poland and Bulgaria on Wednesday after both countries refused to pay for energy supplies in rubles.
** A Japanese railway company, Tokyu, says it now uses just solar and other renewable energy to power its sprawling train service. That means the emissions of carbon dioxide for its network of seven train lines and one tram service, plus all its stations, stand at zero as of April 1.
