US green energy firms brace for federal funding cuts
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US green energy firms brace for federal funding cuts
Getty ImagesUS green fuel company HIF Global has a big vision for Texas's Matagorda County: a $7bn (£5.2bn) commercial scale e-methanol factory to supply the world market.
The plant, which it claims would be the largest to date anywhere, would make e-methanol from captured carbon dioxide and green hydrogen produced on site using renewable energy.
Its construction would create thousands of jobs and the product would power ships and planes in a far cleaner way.
But the company has yet to make its final investment decision. It is waiting to see what the Republican-led Congress does to clean energy tax credits, in particular the one for clean hydrogen production.
The fate of the subsidies is part of a sweeping budget bill currently under consideration by the Senate.
A version of the legislation passed by the lower house cuts the hydrogen tax credit, amongst others, and scales back more.
The clean hydrogen tax credit would help reduce the cost of the American technology going into the facility, and aide in competing with Chinese e-methanol producers, says Lee Beck, HIF Global's senior vice president for global policy and commercial strategy.
“The goal is not to be dependent on tax credits over the long run, but to get the project started.”
Ms Beck can't say yet what the outcome for the Matagorda facility will be if the tax credit is ultimately killed, except that it will make things hard â and the US isn't the only location the company operates in.
HIFThe Trump administration has been particularly hostile to green energy.
Amongst the President's actions since taking office in January include initiating the US's withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement and temporarily suspending renewable energy projects on federal lands (he has a particular disdain for wind power).
Trump has also directed agencies to pause Green New Deal funds, which he regularly calls “Green New Scam” funds: grants and loans being made under the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), enacted under Biden's presidency in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
Those grants and loans, together with the clean energy tax credits that are also part of the IRA, have been funnelling billions of new federal and private dollars into developing clean energy.
“It is tumultuous time,” says Adie Tomer, of the Brookings Institution, a think tank. “We are doing the exact opposite of our developed world peers.”
Court battles are ongoing over the President's order to pause green funding, which might ultimately end up in the Supreme Court. In the meantime, agencies are conducting their own reviews and making their own decisions.
Getty ImagesJessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, which represents companies involved in carbon capture and storage, laments the lack of clarity from the administration.
Members, she explains, have won project funding under the IIJA â including, for example, to build direct air capture facilities. But while projects generally have been able to access funds already awarded to earlier phases, it is unclear if they will be able to progress to additional phases where additional funds are supposed to be made available.
“It is causing uncertainty, which is really bad for project deployment,” says Ms Stolark. “If you endanger the success of these first-of-a-kind projects it just takes the wind out of the sails of the whole [carbon management] industry long term.”
Meanwhile, the fate of the IRA, which the Congress has the power to amend or repeal along with the IIJA, is being decided, in part, by the budget bill, which aims to permanently extend President Trump's first term tax cuts by making savings elsewhere.
What exactly will remain of the Federal green energy agenda when both the House and Senate agree a compromise version remains to be seen.
It seems likely the IRA's tax credits, which are generally scheduled to expire at the end of 2032, though some extend beyond that date, will take a heavy hit, even if the IRA dodges the bullet of outright repeal.
Also marked for termination include the tax credits for consumers buying EVs and making their homes more efficient.
Many others, such as those for producing clean electricity and manufacturing clean energy components like wind turbine parts, solar panels and batteries, would be phased out earlier or made harder and less worthwhile to secure.
That many of the projects set to benefit from the tax credits are in Republican areas seems to have had little sway in the House, notes Ashur Nissan of policy advice firm Kaya Partners.
But critics say that the Biden green energy initiatives are too expensive.
The IRA's energy tax credits are “multiple times” larger than initial estimates, and expose American taxpayers to “potentially unlimited liability” noted a recent report from the libertarian Cato Institute advocating their full repeal.
Meanwhile, actual clean energy investment in the US including from both government and private sources (the far larger share) dropped 3.8% in the first quarter of 2025 to $67.3bn, a second quarterly decline, according to new figures released by the Clean Investment Monitor.
“Momentum is sagging a bit which is a little concerning,” says Hannah Hess of the Rhodium Group research firm, which partners with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to produce it. She attributes the trend to a mix of high inflation, high interest rates, global supply chain issues and uncertainty in the policy environment created by the new administration.
There was also, she observes, a record number of clean energy manufacturing projects cancelled in the first quarter of 2025 â six projects mostly in batteries and representing $6.9bn in investmentâ though it is difficult to say to what extent the new administration was a driver.
More worrying to Ms Hess is the decline since the last quarter in announcements for some types of new projects, which she believes can be “more strongly” attributed to the policy situation, with companies lacking confidence there will be demand for the clean products their projects would produce.
HeirloomTariffs, which will increase factory construction costs if components need to be imported, are an extra factor that may negatively influence project decisions going forward, notes Anthony DeOrsey of the Cleantech Group research and consulting firm.
Investment aside, companies are also making shifts in how they market their products.
The homepage of LanzaJet â which produces Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) from ethanol â used to emphasise how scaling SAF could “meet the urgent moment of climate change”. It now focusses on its potential to “harness the energy of locally produced feedstocks”.
SAF has never been about just one thing, notes CEO Jimmy Samartzis. Tailoring messaging to be “relevant to the stakeholders we are engaging with” makes sense.
The company is current waiting on a $3m grant it was awarded by the Federal Aviation Authority last August as part of a nearly $300m program designed to help aviation transition to SAF and which was funded under the IRA.
“It is approved funding, but it is stuck at this point,” says Mr Samartzis.
