CARBON CAPTURE: An industrial gas supplier announces plans for a $4.5 billion “blue hydrogen” and carbon capture facility in Louisiana that the governor says will be the largest carbon sequestration project in the world. (Associated Press, Lafayette Daily Advertiser)

PIPELINES: A congressional subcommittee begins to make the case for stricter regulation of thousands of abandoned offshore wells, platforms and pipelines, including 18,000 miles of decommissioned pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico. (Bloomberg)

POLITICS:
• Environmental groups greet a new North Carolina energy law with faint praise and criticism because it gives utilities more tools to increase profits and loopholes to sidestep the state’s emissions reduction goals. (Inside Climate News)
• A central Florida Democrat files legislation to transition the state to 100% clean energy by 2050, establishing goals for carbon neutrality and a committee on job creation for those displaced by the transition to clean energy. (WMFE)

SOLAR: A Georgia Tech study finds homeowners who install solar panels wind up using more electricity than before going green. (news release)

OIL & GAS:
• Royal Dutch Shell considers converting a shuttered crude oil refinery in Louisiana into a manufacturing facility to make low-carbon alternative fuels. (The Advocate)
• The oil and natural gas industry’s use of PFAS chemicals in fracking and the lack of standards and regulations fuels growing concern in Louisiana and Texas communities. (KTBS)
• The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences unveils a new 24 MW power plant with diesel generators. (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

NUCLEAR: Georgia Power wants ratepayers to cover most of an annual $224 million cost for the first of two nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle. (Associated Press)

ELECTRIC VEHICLES: A Georgia university unveils three electric vehicle charging stations on campus. (Cherokee Tribune & Ledger News)

OVERSIGHT:
• A small investor-owned electric utility in southwestern Virginia asks state regulators for a major rate increase just one year after receiving another significant rate bump. (Virginia Mercury)
• Mississippi regulators approve a rate increase for customers of natural gas company Atmos Energy. (Delta Democrat-Times)
• An Alabama city’s utility department implements a natural gas rate increase beginning next month. (WHNT)

CLIMATE: Federal flood insurance rates are rising to reflect growing risk from climate change, threatening to make homes in coastal areas such as the Florida Keys unaffordable. (WMOT)

TRANSITION: A landscape architecture professor at the University of Virginia wins a $100,000 prize for her work remediating toxic dumps, Superfund sites and “gnarly” wastelands. (WEMC)

COMMENTARY:
• Kentucky policymakers must embrace solar power to meet energy demand and ensure the state is never again so reliant on a single form of power as it was coal, writes a former federal official. (Kentucky Today)
• West Virginia’s lack of electric vehicle infrastructure means it’s missing out on massive job creation and economic development from the sector’s rapid growth, writes an EV advocate. (Charleston Gazette-Mail)

Mason has worked as a journalist since 2001, covering Appalachian communities and the issues that affect them. He compiles the Southeast Energy News digest. Mason previously worked as a wildlife biologist before moving into journalism by freelancing at Coast Weekly in Monterey, California, before taking an internship in 2001 at High Country News. He wrote for the Enterprise Mountaineer in western North Carolina and the Roanoke Times in western Virginia before going freelance in 2012. His work has appeared in Southerly, Daily Yonder, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, WVPB’s Inside Appalachia and elsewhere. Mason was born and raised in Clifton Forge, Virginia, and now lives with his family and a small herd of goats in Floyd County, Virginia.