David Blackmon
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
Make no mistake about it, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) signed into law on Friday by President Donald Trump falls neatly in line with the Trump energy and climate agenda. Despite complaints by critics of the deal that Majority Leader John Thune struck with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski to soften the bill’s effort to end wind and solar subsidies from the Orwellian 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the OBBBA continues – indeed, accelerates – the Trumpian energy revolution.
Leaders in the oil and gas industry, hamstrung at every opportunity by the Biden presidency, hailed the bill as a chance to move back into some semblance of boom times. Tim Stewart, President of the U.S. Oil and Gas Association, told his members in a memo that, “For the oil and gas industry, the bill…signals a transformative opportunity to enhance domestic production.”
API CEO Mike Sommers also praised the OBBBA as a positive step for his members: “This historic legislation will help usher in a new era of energy dominance by unlocking opportunities for investment, opening lease sales and expanding access to oil and natural gas development. (RELATED: Why Oil Market Held Firm In Face Of Another Middle East War)
While leaders of organizations like those must curb their enthusiasm to some extent in their public statements, they and their peers must be somewhat amazed at how much real substantive change the thin GOP majorities shepherded by Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to stuff into this bill. This industry, historically an easily demonized bogeyman for Democrats and too often ignored by previous Republican presidents, does not experience days as encouraging as July 3 was in the nation’s capital.
Even so, many Republicans, especially in the House, remained unsatisfied by amendments the Senate made to the bill related to IRA subsidy rollbacks. To help Speaker Johnson hold the party’s narrow House majority together, President Trump committed the executive branch to strict enforcement of the new limitations, and promised the White House will work with congressional allies to move a major deregulation package ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
But the OBBBA as passed is chock full of energy and environment-related provisions. FTI Consulting, a business consultancy with a major presence in Washington, DC, published a quick analysis Thursday that projects natural gas and nuclear as the biggest winners as the OBBBA’s impacts begin to take hold across the United States. Interestingly, the analysis also projects battery storage to expand more rapidly over the next five years even as wind and solar suffer from the phasing-out of their IRA subsidies.
The side deal struck by Thune and Murkowski is likely to result in significant new investment into wind and solar facilities as developers strive to get as many projects on the books as possible to meet the “commenced construction” requirement by the July 4, 2026 deadline. The bill’s previous language would have required projects to be placed into service by that time. But even that softer requirement will almost certainly cause a flow of capital investment out of wind and solar once that deadline passes, given the reality that many of their projects are not sustainable without constant flows of government subsidies.
What it all means is that the OBBBA, combined with all the administration’s prior moves to radically shift the direction of federal energy and climate policy away from intermittent energy and electric vehicles back to traditional forms of power generation and internal combustion cars, effectively reset the policy playing field back to 2019, prior to the COVID pandemic. That was a time when America had become as energy independent as it had been in well over half a century and was approaching the “Energy Dominance” position so dear to President Trump’s heart.
Trump’s signing of the OBBBA gives the oil and gas, nuclear, and even the coal industry a chance at a do over. It is an opportunity that comes with great pressure, both from government and the public, to perform. That means rapid expansion in gas power generation unseen in 20 years, rapid development of next generation nuclear, and even a probable chance to permit and build new coal capacity in the near future.
Second chances like this do not come around often. If these great industries fail to grab this brass ring and run with it, it may never come around again. Let’s go, folks.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
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“Second chances“
In the UK, chance would be a fine thing. We are still being bombarded by the narrative:
“Deadly heatwaves are the new reality – we need to transform the UK’s cities and towns to survive them”
There’s a lot to be anxious about as a new parent, let alone in a heatwave when the thermometer in your one-year-old daughter’s room is reading 26C. That’s six degrees higher than the upper limit of the recommended temperature for a child’s room.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/06/deadly-heatwaves-adapt-cities-towns
When you have been taught “climate change” at school and university with no opposing or countering view… 26C can indeed be fatal.
That’s where they are.
You forgot the Holocaust gassing-
How gas stoves kill 40,000 Europeans each year
26°C is 78°F. In the USA we are constantly bombarded by messaging to set our A/C thermostat at 78 or higher in the summer. Our central A/C cooled houses are at 78°F (26°C) all summer long with no ill affects to any children or babies. Requiring 20°C as a maximum is requiring 68°F in the summer
Sorry this is garbage. The highest population growth is in India where the temperature regularly exceeds 40DegC. I lived in the Zambezi Valley for years my kids survived.
The slightly more permissive phase out of new “alternative energy” project starts for purposes of Federal incentives is a tiny price to pay for what was achieved in this bill. Projects that start construction within the next year have been in development for years already, and the government should not discount the fact that, no matter the objective of reducing Federal incentives for questionable projects, the developers and their investors deserve at least some consideration for the funds and efforts already sunk under government policy as it was. The great news is that in less than a year, the incentives are done once and for all (at least, as long as the Republicans control any of the Presidency or either House of Congress).
Who’s paying?
” the analysis also projects battery storage to expand more rapidly over the next five years “
In their fever dreams.
Much like Batteries Expand when exposed to too much heating
We desperately need Donald Trump’s OBBBA Energy Policy to be applied in the whole of the UK immediately. It is horrifying to watch our ill informed and weak decision makers while seeing such vastly superior energy common sense.from the United States.
Not so fast ….
As I understand the BBB as finally passed, the subsidies for those wind and solar projects which are initiated by the deadline of July 4th of 2026 and which meet the bill’s other criteria will be given subsidies for the next twenty-five to thirty years.
The Investment Banks Are Cheering This On” Dave Walsh Exposes Green New Scam Loophole In Big Beautiful Bill (Dave Walsh, Bannons War Room, July 1st 2025)
Dave Walsh points out that 70% of investment for new-build electric generation spent since 2019 has been for wind, solar, and batteries. Despite the billions spent on the renewables since 2019, the net increase in America’s electicity generation capacity has been only 2%.
Walsh points out that growing America’s generation capacity at the rate of 2% every five years doesn’t come anywhere close to meeting the energy needs of a reindustrialized America if Trump’s goal of bring industry back to our shores is to be accomplished.
Every dollar spent on wind and solar is a dollar not spent on reliable baseload generation which can support American reindustrialization in the next twenty-five to thirty years.
So far, I haven’t seen any evidence or valid arguments that the mad rush to wind and solar will be slowed to any appreciable extent by the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill.
Right!
Stop doing stupid (destabilizing) stuff(!) pretty well describes all the Executive Orders .. that the Congress will need to take up, in the process of time.
The promise (not discussed herein) is that this will require separate so-called recission bills, in order to clean up the remaining (IRA) mess left untouched by the OBBB.
Can’t quite imagine that this will work … but then …
Who would’ve thunk that the OBBB would get thru the ol’ sausage-grinder?
IMHO, that list is what ‘all of the above’ should mean.
A few other not-so-modest wishes:
A. Please put the military (Corps of Engineers) in charge of all this — consistent with the bold rhetoric of this Administration: ‘State of Emergency‘, ‘New Cold War‘ and so forth …
B. Especially the [Nuclear] Navy in charge of so-called ‘Next-Gen’ power generation; the civilian sector has been a failure for so long that … who could put any faith in that approach!
C. Coal & Uranium (thorium etc.) fueled generation need to be distributed throughout the power grid. Who would trust the natural-gas pipelines (pumps & valves etc.) to keep functioning, just when one needs them most?
D. Insofar as it can build upon the technical miracles of horizontal drilling / hydraulic fracturing, geothermal generation could be added to the list of ‘reliables’. In much the way that the pre-2005 chronic shortages of natural gas supply were turned into a super-abundance as a byproduct of drilling for tight oil.
One incidental: “recission” — searched in vain to see any mention of this term (or tactic) that has been proposed elsewhere as the path to cleaning up the remaining (IRA) mess left untouched by the OBBB. Though one would probably hate to see what it takes to ‘buy off’ seven (7) more Senators.
Well, it is better than President AutoPen.
That’s Pres. Otto Q. Penn to you, buddy!
(The ‘Q’ represents the blank look on his face. ‘You know the Thing!’)
What does commencing construction mean? Does the developer need to have shovels in the ground, or is filling for permits enough?
That will be defined by lawsuits and appeals over the next decade.
Our tax dollars at work.
Sad, but true.
Nice report David.