** President Donald Trump said he was not concerned about rising U.S. gas prices driven by the widening Iran conflict, telling Reuters in an exclusive interview that the U.S. military operation was his priority. “I don’t have any concern about it,” he said, when asked about the higher prices at the pump. “They’ll drop very rapidly when this is over, and if they rise, they rise, but this is far more important than having gasoline prices go up a little bit.”
** Department of the Interior ended the Trump administration’s first Alaskan oil and gas lease sale without a single bidder for more than a million acres of federal waters in the Cook Inlet. In a statement, the Sierra Club called the auction, which it opposed, “a big fat failure” and a repeat of the last offshore lease sale in Alaska in 2022, which brought in just one bid.
** Two federal lawsuits have been filed regarding the March lease sale that could make millions of acres of Alaskan land available for development. Conservation organizations and an Iñupiat group filed the suits to challenge the federal government’s push to open more areas of Alaska to oil and gas drilling.
** According to The Texas Tribune, the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Texas at Austin estimated that average demand on the grid could almost triple by 2050. However, the first small modular nuclear reactor, or SMR, could be powering an industrial plant in the state by the early 2030s.
WORLD
** China has been in talks with Iran to allow oil tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz. The war has left the strait closed with countries around the world cut off from a fifth of global oil and liquefied natural gas supplies.
** Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that he would prefer not to repair a damaged oil pipeline that delivers Russian crude to Central Europe despite rising tensions with neighboring Hungary and Slovakia over interruptions to oil flows. Russian oil shipments to Hungary and Slovakia have been halted since Jan. 27 after what Ukrainian officials say were Russian drone attacks that damaged the Druzhba pipeline, which crosses Ukrainian territory.
** United States Interior Secretary Doug Burgum sounded an optimistic note as he prepared to leave Venezuela after a two-day visit, telling journalists a new mining law will create opportunities for companies, licenses allowing them to operate are on the horizon and the interim government of Delcy Rodriguez has promised to ensure their security.
** The US Treasury Department issued a 30-day waiver allowing India to buy Russian oil currently stuck at sea. It came after Washington spent months pressuring New Delhi to avoid buying Russian oil in an effort to reduce money flowing to Moscow’s war effort in Ukraine.