2025-03-11 20:32
HOUSTON, March 11 (Reuters) - NextDecade Corporation (NEXT.O) , opens new tab CEO Matt Schatzman said on Tuesday he expects natural gas demand to continue to grow at around 2% for the next 15 years. "When you look at natural gas demand over the last 15 years, I think it's grown by almost 2% fairly steadily. I expect it's going to continue to grow at around the same rate over the next 15 years," he said at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston. He added that he expects natural gas production to rise quickly enough to serve the growing U.S. LNG export market as well as demand from power generators serving data centers. "I think there's enough gas to handle a large portion of the AI and LNG exports," he said, adding he does not expect gas prices to spike. NextDecade is seeking to develop the 17.61 million tonnes per annum Rio Grande LNG terminal in Texas. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ceraweek-nextdecade-ceo-expects-natural-gas-demand-keep-growing-2-2025-03-11/
2025-03-11 20:24
HOUSTON, March 11 (Reuters) - U.S. regulators have approved the expansion of Cheniere Energy's (LNG.N) , opens new tab Corpus Christi liquefied natural gas plant in Texas, a Cheniere executive said on Tuesday. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved construction of the company's Midscale trains 8 and 9 project, the company's Chief Commercial Officer Anatol Feygin said at an industry conference in Houston. Cheniere is the largest U.S. LNG producer and played a key role in the U.S. becoming the world's largest exporter of the superchilled gas. The addition of the two production trains is expected to add another 3 million metric tonnes per annum of LNG to Cheniere's production at its Corpus Christi, Texas, plant. The plant's current capacity is 15 million metric tonnes per annum. Cheniere is also building its Stage 3 expansion at the Corpus Christi site. Stage 3 will add a further 10 million metric tonnes per annum. Cheniere applied to FERC in March 2023 for approval to build its Midscale expansion and the approval was granted on Monday, Feygin said. FERC approval is needed to construct LNG plants in the U.S. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ceraweek-regulator-approved-cheniere-texas-lng-plant-expansion-says-exec-2025-03-11/
2025-03-11 20:21
Canadian dollar gains 0.2% against the greenback Touches its weakest since March 4 at 1.4521 Investors expect BoC rate cut on Wednesday 10-year yield rises 2.1 basis points TORONTO, March 11 (Reuters) - The Canadian dollar recovered from an earlier one-week low against its U.S. counterpart on Tuesday as American and Canadian officials agreed to meet to discuss a trade war that showed signs of heating up, and ahead of an expected interest rate cut by the Bank of Canada. The loonie was trading 0.2% higher at 1.4410 per U.S. dollar, or 69.40 U.S. cents, after earlier touching its weakest since March 4 at 1.4521. U.S. President Donald Trump ramped up a burgeoning trade war with Canada, vowing to double tariffs set to take effect within hours on all imported steel and aluminum products from America's northern neighbor to 50%. Trump later said he would likely lower them after Ontario Premier Doug Ford agreed to suspend a surcharge on electricity the province supplies to U.S. homes and meet with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on Thursday. Canada sends about 75% of its exports to the United States, and economists have said a trade war could push its economy into recession. "Reality is catching up with Canadian interest rates," said Erik Nelson, a macro strategist at Wells Fargo Securities in London. "The Bank of Canada is going to have to cut a bit more than the market was pricing." Investors have moved in recent days to nearly fully price in a 25-basis-point interest rate cut by the BoC on Wednesday and expect at least two further cuts by the end of 2025. Since June, the central bank has reduced the benchmark rate by two percentage points to support the economy to its current setting of 3%. The price of oil, one of Canada's major exports, settled 0.3% higher at $66.25 a barrel, clawing back some of the previous day's decline. Canadian bond yields were mixed across a steeper curve. The 10-year was up 2.1 basis points at 3.007%. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/canadian-dollar-recovers-one-week-low-amid-trade-war-chaos-2025-03-11/
2025-03-11 20:18
SMRs face cost, security, and regulatory challenges U.S. regulatory framework for SMRs is underdeveloped HALEU fuel safety and demand growth concerns persist HOUSTON, March 11 (Reuters) - Everyone from the U.S. energy secretary to Big Tech touts small modular nuclear reactors as a potential answer to booming power demand, but the technology is struggling to become commercial due to costs and regulatory hurdles. Energy-hungry data centers powering artificial intelligence are expected to spike electricity demand, including in the United States where its use has been mostly flat for two decades. Backers of small modular reactors say the technology will eventually be cheaper and faster than today's nuclear power plants because it would be built out of mass-produced parts rather than as massive bespoke projects. The reactors can theoretically produce virtually emissions-free electricity. But the only countries that have built SMRs also have centralized governments, which has helped projects secure financing and decide which SMR fuel types and coolants to use. Russia opened a floating SMR in the Arctic in 2019 and China opened an SMR in 2023. The U.S. regulatory framework is underdeveloped, other power sources are cheaper, and there are nagging concerns about uranium supplies and radioactive waste. Greg Jaczko, former chairman of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, or NRC, said the players pushing SMRs are not utilities with decades of experience dealing with the intricacies and safety requirements of nuclear plants, but rather AI companies, the data center community and vendors. "To really move forward aggressively with a new nuclear build (of SMRs) you really want the established, experienced players to be driving the trend," he said. 'AT THE BEGINNING' Global gas supplies are growing and solar power and battery storage costs are falling, providing stiff competition for advanced nuclear technology to emerge. "We are truly at the beginning of a new industry," U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright told Reuters in an interview at the CERAWeek conference in Houston. The first SMRs will not be able to compete with gas but they will become cheaper as technologies develop, and the U.S. government will try to help them clear regulations and with financing, said Wright, who sat on the board of SMR company Oklo (OKLO.N) , opens new tab until becoming secretary. Oklo signed a non-binding agreement in December to deploy SMRs to data center operator Switch over 20 years. Oklo hopes to get a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in late 2027, after the regulator initially rejected the application in 2022. Oklo's founder and CEO Jacob DeWitte blamed the rejection on difficulties with remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. "We pushed the envelope," DeWitte told Reuters. "But we got a ton of valuable progress and feedback." It can take years for the NRC to approve reactors, which generate radioactive waste and must control operating and proliferation risks. Complicating matters, many plan to operate with special fuels, new technologies, and alternative coolants. "The regulatory framework really hasn't been implemented or built yet," said Rahul Vashi, a partner at law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Vashi estimated it could take multiple presidential administrations before a commercial SMR is built. NRC spokesperson Scott Burnell said the agency is working with vendors to "meet our mission of enabling safe reactor deployment as efficiently as possible." But even an NRC license is not a guarantee of success. The only commercial SMR that the NRC has approved so far axed its project. NuScale (SMR.N) , opens new tab terminated its Idaho project in 2023 after costs nearly doubled, despite a 2020 Energy Department contract for $1.35 billion over 10 years. NuScale CEO John Hopkins said on an earnings call last week that the company has yet to land a deal with any U.S. data center operator due to the complexities of putting projects together, but continues to advance a project in Romania. Amazon.com (AMZN.O) , opens new tab and Alphabet's Google (GOOGL.O) , opens new tab signed agreements late last year with emerging nuclear companies to power data centers with SMRs. "Nuclear has to be a part of the mix," Ruth Porat, president and Chief Investment Officer of Alphabet and Google, told CERAWeek. "If we don't start now in a focused way and replicate a number of them ...we're not going to be able to be able to drive down the cost curve." A spokesperson for Kairos Power, the company partnering with Google, said it believes the NRC has the "technical breadth necessary to review our technology, while recognizing they need to continue innovating to be positioned to field the large number of applications anticipated in the coming years." DEEPSEEK CLOUDS DEMAND Many SMRs plan to run on high-assay low-enriched uranium, or HALEU, fuel that is up to 20% pure uranium instead of up to 5% for traditional reactors. The U.S. government is beginning to fund efforts to produce HALEU domestically as it implements a ban on uranium imports from Russia, a top producer. But some physicists question the fuel's safety. The National Nuclear Security Administration is commissioning a study on HALEU's proliferation risks after physicists warned it could be used to make a nuclear weapon. The scientists recommended limiting HALEU to 10% to 12% enriched. Such limits could lower SMR efficiency. Amazon said it is adding nuclear to its energy portfolio because "it's carbon free, scalable, safe and reliable." X-Energy, an SMR company partnering with Amazon, has applied for a license at a fuel plant in Tennessee and its fuel will be proliferation-resistant, said X-Energy spokesperson Robert McEntyre. Another potential industry headwind is uncertainty over the speed of future power demand growth. Much of the excitement for SMRs has been fueled by projections that AI will trigger a massive increase in electricity consumption. But Chinese start-up DeepSeek's announcement earlier this year that open-source AI models would use far less power raised questions about those forecasts. "If (AI) models continue to get smaller and efficient, we could have an enormous AI boom that increasingly can run on regular consumer devices locally and thus does not need such enormous energy," said Martin Chorzempa, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. (This story has been refiled to remove an image, with no changes to text) Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/ceraweek-analysis-small-nuclear-power-struggles-cusp-us-electricity-demand-boom-2025-03-11/
2025-03-11 16:51
BRASILIA, March 11 (Reuters) - Brazil will eventually need to resume discussions on requiring financial technology companies to report transaction values to the tax revenue service, the agency's head said on Tuesday. Speaking at a Senate hearing, Robinson Barreirinhas cited strong indications that lesser-known payment institutions are being used for money laundering. Barreirinhas said the tax revenue service has intelligence capabilities for tracking transactions that the government still intends to extend to fintechs. It suspended such plans announced last year following a strong public backlash. "I don't want to demonize fintechs ... but the truth is that many end up being used (for illicit transactions) due to the ease of opening accounts," he said, noting that stricter controls should be required to open accounts. In September, Brazil's tax revenue service issued a rule requiring fintechs to report transactions, including those made through the widely used Pix instant payment system, to tax authorities starting in January, aligning them with banks. Opposition to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government framed the measure as a deliberate attempt to tax workers, prompting the administration to suspend the rule in mid-January amid a sharp decline in the leftist leader's popularity in opinion polls. Barreirinhas said the revenue service is concerned about the financing of organized crime in Latin America's largest economy through smuggled cigarettes and e-cigarettes, cryptocurrencies and online betting. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/technology/brazil-eyes-revisiting-fintech-reporting-rules-amid-money-laundering-concerns-2025-03-11/
2025-03-11 13:47
March 11 (Reuters) - The Russian rouble strengthened to a more than six-week high against the dollar on Tuesday, buoyed by subdued imports and hopes for a resolution to the war in Ukraine, even after Kyiv launched its biggest drone attack on Moscow. Ukraine's attack, in which at least 91 drones targeted the Russian capital, sparked fires, closed airports and forced dozens of flights to be diverted, Russian officials said. By 1319 GMT, the rouble was up 2.7% at 85.25 to the dollar in over-the-counter market trade, its strongest level since August 7, 2024. Against the Chinese yuan, the most traded foreign currency in Russia, the rouble was up 0.9% to 11.77. The rouble is up against the dollar this year, mostly thanks to expectations of improved relations between Moscow and Washington that could produce some conflict resolution in Ukraine and the possible easing of sanctions against Russia. A trader at a major Russian bank, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said active rouble buying was happening because there is a feeling in the market that agreements may have already been reached. The rouble brushed aside U.S. President Donald Trump's threat last week of imposing banking sanctions on Russia to force it to the negotiating table and was unmoved by Ukraine's drone bombardment on Tuesday. Strong exports, subdued imports and the geopolitical risk premium is keeping the national currency from devaluation, said BCS World of Investments analysts. "The national currency's exchange rate can only devalue if negotiations are disrupted without prospects for their resumption, but this is not the baseline scenario," they said. Alfa Bank strategist John Walsh said Russian investors were waiting for news from crunch talks between Ukrainian and U.S. officials in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, which could provoke a sharp volatility spike. Brent crude oil , a global benchmark for Russia's main export, was up 0.3% at $69.49 a barrel. Sign up here. https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/rouble-hits-over-six-month-high-after-ukraine-pummels-moscow-with-drones-2025-03-11/
