On Monday, Chevron announced plans to acquire oil and gas company Hess for $53 billion in stock.

Less than two weeks prior, Exxon Mobil announced it is acquiring oil company Pioneer Natural Resources for $59.5 billion in stock.

On Tuesday, the International Energy Agency released its annual world energy outlook report that projects global demand for coal, oil and natural gas will hit an all-time high by 2030, a prediction the IEA’s executive director Fatih Birol had telegraphed in September.

The nation's top energy regulator authorized a major energy developer to move forward with a natural gas expansion project in the Pacific Northwest.

A federal commission on Thursday gave the green light to a pipeline project that would increase the flow of Canadian natural gas through the Pacific Northwest and California, despite opposition from tribes, attorneys general, governors and members of Congress.

GTN, a subsidiary of TC Energy, brings in natural gas, which is mostly methane, from Alberta via a 1,377-mile pipeline that cuts through Idaho, Eastern Washington and Oregon to link with California pipeline networks.

Federal regulators on Thursday approved the expansion of a natural gas pipeline in the Pacific Northwest over the protest of environmental groups and top officials in West Coast states, who said it goes against the region’s plans to address climate change and could pose a wildfire risk.

Large-scale clean energy projects from Pennsylvania to California have been selected by the Biden administration for a $7 billion program to kickstart development and production of hydrogen fuel, a key component of President Joe Biden’s agenda to slow climate change.

His goal is to establish seven regional hydrogen hubs to help replace fossil fuels such as coal and oil with cleaner-burning hydrogen as an energy source for vehicles, manufacturing and generating electricity.

Native American communities in the Southwest are divided over new federal protections for land some tribes consider sacred.

This summer, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced new protections for an extraordinary archaeological site in New Mexico. The department put a 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, forbidding drilling for oil and natural gas. Many Native Americans consider Chaco Canyon sacred, but Native communities are divided on the new rule, as Alice Fordham with member station KUNM reports.

The Biden administration plans to schedule three oil and gas lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico over the next five years, a reversal of the president’s campaign promise to stop all new offshore drilling under his administration. 

The Interior Department, which oversees oil leases, said the sales are necessary because of last year’s clean-energy legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. The agency said the law mandated that millions of acres of oil and gas leases needed to be offered by the administration in exchange for the expansion of offshore wind projects.

A federal court struck down the Biden administration's last-minute restrictions on an upcoming offshore oil and gas lease sale, in a ruling late Thursday evening.

Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana granted a preliminary injunction request from plaintiffs — the State of Louisiana, industry association American Petroleum Institute, and oil companies Chevron and Shell — to block the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's (BOEM) restrictions on Lease Sale 261. The lease sale spanning millions of acres across the Gulf of Mexico is slated for next week.

Joe Biden’s on a roll. After banning uranium mining in Arizona, the president’s Department of the Interior announced a proposal to ban mining and oil-drilling in northern New Mexico for 50 years.

DOI’s proposal will federalize 4,000 acres of “sacred Tribal lands” and promote their “scenic integrity, cultural importance, recreational values, and wildlife habitat connectivity.” The specific land Biden is looking to “protect” contains the some of the state’s largest gravel mines. Not to mention, New Mexico has vast copper, silver, and lead deposits.

Exxon Mobil issued its first public statement that burning fossil fuels contributes to climate change in 2006, following years of denial. In public forums, the company argued that the risk of serious impact on the environment justified global action.