** The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced on Tuesday that it has approved the construction of a 732-mile high-voltage transmission line across the Western U.S. that will help transport renewable energy. The transmission line, called the TransWest Express Project, will run from south-central Wyoming through northwestern Colorado and central Utah before reaching its endpoint in southern Nevada, according to the BLM.
** A drilling company prepares to restart production at its offshore oilfield in southern California after a connecting pipeline’s 595-barrel spill of crude shut down operations in 2021.
** A report finds the nation’s most “EV-friendly” metro areas are all in the Western U.S., with Seattle in the top spot.
** Contractors embark on the ambitious and often arduous task of plugging hundreds of thousands of abandoned oil and gas wells, including more than 4,500 “orphan” wells with no viable owners in Louisiana alone.
** An environmental group on Tuesday sued to block Pacific Gas & Electric from seeking to extend the federal operating licenses for California’s last nuclear power plant.
** Ford Motor Co said Tuesday that next year it will start retooling its sport utility vehicle assembly plant in Oakville, Ontario to produce electric vehicles, fulfilling a promise made to Canada’s Unifor union during contract bargaining in 2020.
World
** Iraq has petitioned a U.S. federal court to enforce an arbitration award against Turkey related to Iraqi oil exports through a pipeline to a Turkish port, according to documents filed with the court.
** Non-OPEC countries will account for a higher percentage of oil production gains this year and next, a reversal of the last two years, the U.S. Energy Information Administration predicted on Tuesday.
** Hungary signed new agreements Tuesday to ensure its continued access to Russian energy, a sign of the country’s continuing diplomatic and trade ties with Moscow that have confounded some European leaders amid the war in Ukraine.
** Solar and wind energy surged to make a record 12 percent of the world’s electricity in 2022, a climate think tank calculated in a report Wednesday — though coal remained the leading source globally.