** ConocoPhillips announced it has entered into an agreement to sell its interests in the Ursa and Europa Fields and Ursa Oil Pipeline Company LLC to Shell Offshore Inc. and Shell Pipeline Company LP, subsidiaries of Shell plc, for $735 million subject to customary closing adjustments. The transaction also includes an overriding royalty interest in the Ursa Field. Proceeds from this transaction will be used for general corporate purposes.
** Jennifer Granholm, who served as former President Joe Biden’s energy secretary, has been tapped to the board of Edison International, one of the US’s largest electric utility holding companies. Edison said Granholm would be joining the board of it’s subsidiary Southern California Edison, which delivers electricity to 15 million people in the state.
** Meta’s largest data center to date will be in northeast Louisiana in partnership with Entergy, a Fortune 500 utility serving customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. The $10 billion AI data center will create 500 new full-time jobs.
** Occidental Petroleum (OXY) reported mixed fourth quarter earnings results: beating adjusted earnings estimates with $0.80 per share while revenue of $6.84 billion fell short of expectations.
** Electric truck maker Nikola plans to lay off 855 workers at its Arizona headquarters and production facility as part of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
** Miami-Dade and Broward in Florida spent $126 million to purchase 117 electric buses and build charging stations for the new clean, green fleet. Today, few of the EV buses remain on the road. Most broke down in under a year, pulled from routes while awaiting a backlog of maintenance work.
** Major U.S. airlines and a trade association have challenged a Biden administration rule issued in December requiring new consumer protections for disabled passengers using wheelchairs.
**The Trump administration launches a review of $4 billion in promised federal funding for California’s high-speed rail to determine whether the project is “worthy of a continual investment.”
** The Northern Cheyenne Tribe looks to defend the Biden-era federal coal leasing ban in the Powder River Basin from Montana’s and Wyoming’s lawsuit seeking to overturn the moratorium.
World
** At least four oil tankers have been hit with explosions so far this year — all of them having visited Russia’s territorial waters in the weeks prior to the blasts happening. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the incidents, three of which have happened in the Mediterranean and one in the Baltic, and shipping industry officials say it would be premature to blame Ukraine.
** China has developed a new underwater, cutting-edge intelligent computing center in Hainan Province’s Lingshui. The data capsule with more than 400 high-performance servers was placed on the sea floor. According to a report, the computing center has enough power to support 7,000 conversations per second with AI assistants powered by DeepSeek.
** One of the biggest nickel smelters in Indonesia has slashed production and is close to shutting down completely, just months after the collapse of its Chinese parent company. PT Gunbuster Nickel Industry, which is affiliated with bankrupted stainless steel giant Jiangsu Delong Nickel Industry Co., is delaying payments to local energy suppliers and is unable to procure nickel ore, according to people familiar with the situation.
