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As the Trump administration continues to roll out its sweeping tariff policy, the North American energy industry is working to address the effects of the President’s tariff strategy. The Trump administration intends to “unleash American energy,”¹ in part by imposing tariffs designed to remedy what the administration views as unfair trade practices and increase U.S. domestic energy production. The currently imposed and threatened tariffs will inevitably impact the energy industry and its consumers. The particularly relevant tariffs can be defined in two broad categories: (1) sectoral tariffs, in this case, imposed under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, and (2) the country-specific and “reciprocal tariffs” that the Trump administration has imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Joyce Adetutu, Jason Fleischer, and Stephen Josey emphasize that the unresolved legal status of the IEEPA tariffs creates significant uncertainty for importers. With the tariffs still being collected during appeal, businesses risk overpaying and should consider filing protests to safeguard potential refunds. To navigate this shifting landscape, importers must stay alert to liquidation deadlines and build tariff-related contingencies into their contracts.

On July 3, 2025, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (“FERC” or the “Commission”), the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (“Army Corps”), and the Departments of Energy (“DOE”), Interior (“DOI”), Transportation (“DOT”), Agriculture (“USDA”), and Defense (“DOD”) released sweeping updates to their regulations and procedures implementing the National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”).

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.

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.

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.

For more than twenty years, the North American Free Trade Agreement (“NAFTA”), and later, the United States‑Mexico-Canada Agreement (“USMCA”), have facilitated cross-border trade and investment among the United States, Mexico, and Canada through the elimination of virtually all financial barriers to trade.

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.

In 2016, a new play called Hamilton was dominating Broadway, Pokémon Go was all the rage, and the Summer Olympics were held in Rio.

As the world moves toward cleaner energy, lithium has become crucial, powering electric vehicles and renewable-energy storage systems. With lithium demand set to increase more than 40-fold by 2040, the race to extract this critical mineral has intensified, especially in the United States.

On May 1, 2024, the Council on Environmental Quality (“CEQ”) published the final version of Phase 2 of its National Environmental Policy Act (“NEPA”) rulemaking (“Phase 2 Rule”).