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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.

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 March 14, 2025, President Trump signed legislation disapproving the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulation implementing the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax on methane emissions from the oil and gas sector.

If past is prologue, while the second Trump administration is expected to take a number of actions that could lead to increased volatility with respect to renewable identification number (“RIN”) prices just as the first did, there are signals that the administration may take a more deliberate approach this time to reduce shocks to the RIN market, all the more given the interest in supporting renewable fuel production as a domestic fuel source. And while the California Air Resources Board (“CARB”) took steps last year that impact the ability of biogas projects to generate Low Carbon Fuel Standard (“LCFS”) credits, state legislative headwinds could eventually result in the opening of new environmental credit markets to shore up demand for renewable natural gas (“RNG”). Overall, while significant uncertainty and risk of RIN volatility remains, there continue to be signals from both the federal executive and legislative branches in support of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (“RFS”).

On December 26, 2024, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the Climate Change Superfund Act (“CCSA” or the “Act”) into law.

Despite the Biden administration’s public support for carbon capture and sequestration (“CCS”), we saw neither faster CCS permit approvals from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) nor a significant push towards state primary enforcement authority (“primacy”) during the former president’s tenure.

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.

In his first two days in office, newly inaugurated President Donald J. Trump signed a flurry of Executive Orders, including several aimed at supporting the traditional energy industry.

On February 3, 2025, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California granted a partial motion to dismiss filed by the California Air Resources Board (“CARB”), dismissing the claims that SB 253 (the Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act) and SB 261 (the Climate-related Financial Risk Act) (collectively the “California Climate Laws”) violate the Supremacy Clause and limitations on extraterritorial regulation.

After little more than a week in office, there is still plenty of speculation, but priorities of the Trump 2.0 Administration are becoming more concrete.

The incoming Trump Administration is expected to prioritize the rollback of Biden-era endangered species regulations, aiming to reduce the regulatory burden on land-intensive businesses and enhance energy independence. This shift may involve reinstating Trump-era rules that limit critical habitat designations and economic considerations in listing decisions. As these changes unfold, businesses could face fewer restrictions related to endangered species, potentially facilitating development, and reducing compliance costs.

On December 17, 2024, the Office of Fossil and Carbon Management of the Department of Energy (“DOE”) released the long-awaited Liquefied Natural Gas (“LNG”) Export Study (“Study”). The Study was released 11 months after the Biden administration paused pending decisions to export LNG to non-Free Trade Agreement (“FTA”) countries on January 26, 2024.