** The Biden administration is announcing it will spend $1.3 billion of new federal funding to help create three new, massive electrical transmission lines in the Southwest and New England, in an effort to improve the nation’s power grid and get more renewable energy into America’s homes and businesses.
** Hedge funds are laying bets on uranium, a critical element in nuclear energy, Bloomberg reported. The price of uranium has swung up by 125% since the end of 2020. While debates on the use of nuclear energy continue, experts see it as key to a future without fossil fuels.
** Toyota will invest an additional $8 billion in the hybrid and electric vehicle battery factory it’s constructing in North Carolina, more than doubling its prior investments and expected number of new jobs, the company announced Tuesday.
** The former head of Exxon Mobil’s shale oil and gas business will return as senior vice president over the company’s most important U.S. oil operation following his successor’s arrest earlier this month.
** In a report published this week from environmental health group Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), specialists analyzed data from fracking disclosures made by oil and gas well operators to FracFocus, a non governmental organization. They found that the fossil fuel industry used about 160 million pounds of undisclosed chemicals in about 5,000 unconventional oil and gas wells throughout the state from 2012 to 2022.
** The Republican-led U.S. House of Representatives is attempting to prevent from awarding federal grant funding to the California High-Speed Rail Authority.
World
** Police arrested 62 climate activists in London Monday after they disrupted traffic with a “slow march”, at the start of a new wave of promised action over Britain’s oil and gas policies.
** Three energy companies including U.S. Westinghouse, France’s EdF and Korea’s KHNP, have submitted their final bids to build the Czech Republic’s newest reactor at the Dukovany nuclear power station as the country strives to become more energy independent and wean itself of fossil fuels.
** BP’s profits have slumped by almost $5bn after a drop in global energy prices hit both its fossil fuel and clean energy businesses. The energy giant reported profits of $3.3bn (£2.7bn) for the third quarter of the year – sharply down from the $8.2bn (£6.8bn) it made in the same period last year.
** A 1.5-gigawatt wind farm has begun operation in the North Sea, and it’s set to bring clean, renewable power to residents of the Netherlands. The annual electricity production is expected to meet the demands of 1.5 million homes, and it will be fully operational in 2024 with 139 wind turbines, reports Electrek.
** The U.N. chief said Tuesday after touring the highest peaks in Nepal that the world should end the fossil fuel age to curb what he says is a devastating level of melting of glaciers in the Himalayan mountains due to global warming.
** , a pioneering climate scientist from Bangladesh who pushed to get the world to understand, pay for and adapt to worsening warming impacts on poorer nations, died of cardiac arrest Saturday. He was 71.
** Several oil reservoirs in the Usinsk district of Russia’s Komi Republic caught fire on Sunday, 29 October. Lukoil-Komi, a branch of the Russian oil company Lukoil, reported that a reservoir near the village of Verkhnekolvinsk in the Komi Republic caught fire, allegedly as a result of a safety rules violation by a contractor.
