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This webinar covered the uptick in project investments in the data center and carbon emission sectors, the competing demands and desire for vast and continuous power, and more.

On June 9, 2025, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced that the U.S. Department of Justice (“DOJ” or the “Department”) will resume investigating and prosecuting violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (the “FCPA”) with a decidedly new “America First” approach to enforcement.

On June 17, 2025 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) published a proposed rule to repeal the amendments to the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (“MATS”) adopted by the Biden administration in 2024.

On May 16, 2025, the Texas Supreme Court issued a decision ruling that, absent specific contractual language, surface owners retain ownership of the caverns created by salt mining operations.

On May 1, 2025, the federal government brought separate suits against both New York and Vermont alleging that these state’s “climate Superfund” statutes are unconstitutional on multiple grounds.

The Texas Legislature has been debating several bills aimed at boosting dispatchable power in ERCOT while erecting new economic and permitting barriers for renewables.

The recent tariffs imposed by the Trump administration mark a significant shift in U.S. trade policy that is expected to have a wide-ranging impact across multiple sectors, including in the energy sector.

On April 8, 2025, President Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Protecting American Energy From State Overreach” (the “Executive Order”), which directs the United States Attorney General to identify and halt the enforcement of state laws and civil actions that burden energy production and may be preempted by Federal law or are otherwise unconstitutional.

On April 8 and 9, 2025, President Donald Trump issued five Presidential Actions (four Executive Orders and one Proclamation, collectively “Presidential Actions”) for the purposes of ensuring adequate and reliable energy generation, meeting growing energy demand, and addressing the national energy emergency declared on January 20, 2025 (EO 14156).

Lithium continues to be a rising star of the natural resources world, and Texas is working to stay on top of the legal issues related to the extraction of lithium from produced water and brine.

A series of recent actions undertaken by President Biden, near the end of his term, and President Trump, in the early days of his presidency, have called into question a key issue under the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act (“OCSLA”) — whether the President can revoke a previous President’s withdrawal of areas of the United States Outer Continental Shelf (“OCS”) from oil and gas leasing.

On February 19, 2025, the Council on Environmental Quality (“CEQ”) released a pre-publication version of an interim final rule (the “Interim Rule”) to rescind all of CEQ’s previous and current regulations implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) alongside a memorandum (the “Memo”) to federal agencies providing guidance on how agencies should revise their individual NEPA regulations and how they should manage NEPA reviews in the meantime.