FROM POMPEO TO PRUITT: ENERGY POLICY FRONT AND CENTER IN CONGRESS: Energy policy was all over Congress Thursday morning, from committee hearings to votes.

Environmentalists and Al Gore attacked Mike Pompeo’s nomination to be secretary of state as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began its hearing. “Senators should reject Mike Pompeo’s nomination to be secretary of state,” Gore tweeted. “He denies the climate crisis, and has been doing the bidding for fossil fuel interests his whole career. The American people deserve better.”

• Hundreds protest Pompeo: Two hundred national, state and local environmental groups this week called on senators to reject Pompeo’s nomination over his “climate change denial” and “extreme anti-environment, anti-consumer safety agenda.”

The letter was signed by Food & Water Watch, 350.org, Greenpeace, Progressive Democrats of America and Public Citizen.

Protesters at his hearing Thursday heckled Pompeo, saying “No Pompeo! No more wars!”

• Vote for Pruitt’s No. 2 coming soon: Also on tap is Andrew Wheeler, President Trump’s nominee to serve as deputy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency.

• First step toward confirmation: The Senate took the first step toward Wheeler’s confirmation by approving a procedural vote Thursday morning to move to a debate before finally voting on his nomination sometime in the next 24 hours.

Some Democrats want the vote to be delayed to vet Wheeler more thoroughly, as the White House reportedly is looking for him to take over if EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is fired in the next few days.

• Democratic support: At least some moderate Democrats have said they will vote for Wheeler, noting their comfort level interacting with him for more than a decade when he was a top staff member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, working mostly for former Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla.

Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who represents a major coal mining state, and Heidi Heitkamp, D-N.D., who is up for re-election in a red-leaning and shale-producing state, have said they plan to approve Wheeler.

The support of at least one Democrat is crucial because Republicans hold only a one-seat majority in the Senate, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is on leave to receive cancer treatment.

• Pallone grills Perry on utility’s bailout plea: Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Rick Perry got schooled by Rep. Frank Pallone, the top Democrat on the Energy and Commerce Committee, on the “illegal” nature of FirstEnergy’s plea to have him save its fleet of coal and nuclear plants.

Pallone said recent public statements by Perry indicate that he will likely not approve the company’s request for him to use his authority under section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act to keep the plant’s open.

Nevertheless, Pallone advised Perry that taking such action would be illegal, as the law was not designed to bail out cash-strapped companies.

Pallone said using the authority would be like “calling 911 because your credit card got declined.” It’s not just “inappropriate, but I think illegal,” Pallone said.

• Grilled over Pruitt’s natural gas trip: Pallone also grilled Perry on whether Pruitt consulted with him before going to Morocco next year to support U.S. sales of liquefied natural gas.

Perry said he does not recall any discussion with Pruitt before he went to North Africa. Pallone said the EPA’s core mission should not be energy promotion abroad.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, a former chairman of the committee, defended Pruitt’s trip, saying any Cabinet-level secretary has the right to discuss anything in the strategic interest of the United States.  

ETHANOL THURSDAY IN THE WHITE HOUSE: President Trump is meeting late Thursday morning with a slew of governors from agriculture states, as well as Sens. Joni Ernst and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, and ethanol policy will likely be a hot topic.

The White House confirmed the meeting Thursday, saying: “The president will meet with governors and congressional leaders to discuss issues impacting the agricultural community including trade.”

Trump’s tariffs also will dominate. China recently increased tariffs on U.S. ethanol imports in the wake of Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, and the country is threatening to target the broader agriculture industry if Trump goes through with his threats to slap tariffs on as much as $150 billion in Chinese imports.

Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue and House members also are attending.

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GOWDY SAYS EPA HAS FAILED TO PROVIDE ALL DOCUMENTS ON PRUITT’S TRAVEL: House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Trey Gowdy said Wednesday that the EPA has failed to provide all documents he requested nearly two months ago related to Pruitt’s frequent use of first-class flights.

The South Carolina Republican had sought answers from the EPA on Feb. 20 about how Pruitt has been able to obtain waivers from federal rules to travel first class.

• Proof of security threats: “The EPA has failed to produce all the documents requested,” Gowdy said Wednesday in a new letter to Pruitt. “Those requests include, but are not limited to, any documents referring or relating to ‘specific, ongoing threats associated with the administrator’s air travel,’ which was the stated basis for obtaining first class tickets.”

The EPA has provided the committee some documents, including those showing that Pruitt spent more than $105,000 in first-class travel in his first year.

• Eye on condo deal: Gowdy confirmed in the letter that his committee is also investigating Pruitt for signing a $50-per-night lease agreement last year to live in the bedroom of a condo owned by the wife of energy lobbyist J. Steven Hart.

PERRY TAKES TRUMP CLEAN COAL AGENDA TO INDIA: Energy Secretary Rick Perry will make selling clean coal technology a key part of high-level talks with Indian officials when he travels to the subcontinent Friday.

• A global market: “The technology we are seeing brought forward on clean coal, carbon capture, is starting to take off across the globe, and I think that is one of the most important things about this,” Perry told Senate appropriators Wednesday.

He said carbon capture utilization and storage technology, or CCUS, will be a key part of his trip, which will go into next week.

• Made in the CCUS: A CCUS plant takes part of the carbon dioxide emissions out of a power plant’s emissions before the smoke goes up the stack. The CO2 is then chilled to become a liquid and injected underground where it is stored or shipped via pipeline to be used by oil and natural gas drillers or to be used even to grow algae to turn into renewable fuels.

PERRY TUCKS CLEAN COAL INTO $99 MILLION IN TECH GRANTS: Perry announced dozens of grants on Thursday totaling $99 million for a bunch of technologies, including carbon capture.

• Mostly about the cloud, but …: The grants mainly support technologies that have more to do with advanced sensors and data and computer technology, like “Photonic Memory Controller Module, Correlating and Analyzing Network Data through Interpretable Decompositions, A Cloud-based Platform for High-Resolution Imagery Management.”

• Clean coal’s in there, too: But in a long list of the technologies, tucked in there is clean coal technology in the form of “High-Efficiency Post Combustion Carbon Capture System,” which is the technology being hooked up to coal plants in North Dakota.

The big shale oil-producing state received the first license from EPA this week to begin injecting CO2 underground from fossil fuel plants.

PUERTO RICO POWER GRID IN ‘MUCH BETTER CONDITION’ BUT 50,000 STILL IN DARK: Puerto Rico’s power grid is “in much better condition” than before Hurricane Maria wiped out an already crippled energy system in September, a top Army Corps of Engineers official said Wednesday.

“It is no secret the grid was in very poor condition before the storm,” said Charles Alexander, director of contingency operations and homeland security headquarters at the Army Corps, in testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “It is in much better condition today.”

• ‘Not resilient’: But Alexander acknowledged that nearly 50,000 customers remain without power on the island, and he would not say definitively if all Puerto Ricans would have their lights back on by the scheduled end of the Corps’ recovery mission on May 18.

“It is not the resilient grid we all recognize is needed,” Alexander said. “We are going to do everything possible to get to as close to 100 percent [power restoration] as possible.”

• Challenges remain: Alexander noted the areas without power are remote, with much of the work accessible only by helicopter.

HURRICANE MARIA CAUSED THE SECOND-LARGEST BLACKOUT IN WORLD HISTORY: The power loss in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands from Hurricane Maria made it the second-largest blackout in world history, the Rhodium Group said in a new report Thursday.

The report found that Maria caused the loss of 3.4 million customer hours of service in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, second only to 2013’s Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, which caused 6.1 million customer hours of lost service.

LAMAR ALEXANDER BLAMES ‘GREMLIN’ FOR BAD TRUMP POLICY ON ELECTRICITY: Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., is blaming a mischievous “gremlin” at the White House for a bad policy in Trump’s fiscal 2019 budget that would sell off the electric transmission assets of the Tennessee Valley Authority, a large public power utility in his state.

• Lock him in the closet: “There is a thing called TVA, which is in Tennessee, and there’s some gremlin over in the Office of Management and Budget, and for every president, somehow, this gremlin makes his way through the floor and gets into some budget proposal to sell either Bonneville or TVA, the transmission assets,” Alexander said in questioning Perry on Wednesday.

Alexander is the chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee, which is hashing out what stays or goes in Perry’s Energy Department budget request for fiscal 2019.

RUNDOWN

New York Times Scott Pruitt’s idea to update an EPA keepsake: Less EPA, More Pruitt

Wall Street Journal OPEC cuts output while U.S. shale steams ahead

Chron.com Oil and gas cybersecurity projects went “to the bottom of the pile” in energy slump

Reuters ‘Urban mining’ in South Korea pulls rare battery materials from recycled tech

Washington Post The oceans’ circulation hasn’t been this sluggish in 1,000 years

Bloomberg Tesla workers claim racial bias and abuse at electric car factory

New York Times An eye in the sky could detect methane leaks on the ground