Friday, 4 September 2026

Argentine President Javier Milei said he would tighten sanctions on companies involved in oil projects around the Falkland Islands, according to Offshore Engineer OEDigital.

Milei said he would sign a decree to accelerate sanctions under Argentine law against companies taking part in oil and gas extraction in the disputed territory, the outlet reported.

Alongside the sanctions measure, Milei said the government would issue an emergency decree to expand defense resources and build a naval base in Tierra del Fuego province, per Offshore Engineer OEDigital.

The Falklands are a British overseas territory roughly 500 km east of the Argentine mainland, and Britain has controlled the islands since 1833, according to the same report.

Two courts are now weighing whether USD 3 billion in environmental and climate justice grant money reaches underserved communities before a September 30 deadline expires, with plaintiffs pushing the Trump administration to release the funds, Inside Climate News reported.

The newer of the two filings landed late Tuesday in the United States. Litigants over the Environmental and Climate Justice Block Grant program asked the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina in Charleston to suspend the end-of-September expiration written into the grants, according to Inside Climate News.

A week earlier the same plaintiffs went to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals with a petition for review by the full bench, targeting a three-judge panel decision that had blocked the money from going out.

That blockage traces back to July, when a federal judge ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to resume running the program through the end of September. The government appealed. The three-judge panel then voted 2-1 to grant a stay pending appeal, and communities were left without the funding, Inside Climate News reported.

The block grant program was canceled in 2025 as part of a broader rollback of environmental and equity-related federal initiatives, according to Inside Climate News. The money at stake was directed at underserved communities.

Kym Meyer, litigation director at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told Inside Climate News that "what the government did was illegal".

Vulcan Energy has issued a pre-feasibility study for Ludwig, a second combined lithium and geothermal project in the Upper Rhine Valley, sited in the Ludwigshafen region, according to electrive.

The study puts capital spending at EUR 1.26 billion, which electrive reports is roughly 15% below the figure for Lionheart, the company's more advanced project near Landau.

Design throughput is 21,100 tonnes of lithium carbonate a year, per the pre-feasibility assumptions cited by electrive. Operating costs are projected at EUR 4,101 per tonne of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE).

Ludwig draws on work already done at Lionheart. For that first project, Vulcan has secured EUR 2.2 billion in financing and holds construction permits for facilities at Landau and Frankfurt-Hoechst, with commercial production scheduled for 2028, electrive reported.

The sequencing is explicit: no final investment decision on Ludwig is expected until production at Lionheart has started successfully. That ties the second project's timetable to delivery on the first rather than to the study itself.

Brazil's Senate approved a bill regulating the exploration of critical minerals, including rare earths, according to Mongabay. The text now goes to President Lula for signature.

The legislation sets out a legal framework and offers tax incentives for processing minerals inside Brazil, Mongabay reported. It also establishes a fund to back mining projects and pushes producers to process material domestically rather than shipping it out raw.

Brazil holds the world's second-largest reserves of rare earth elements, per Mongabay. Those elements go into products such as smartphones and electric vehicles. Mongabay described the Senate vote as a step toward exploiting those reserves.

The processing incentives are the operative part for anyone tracking where value lands in the supply chain. Extraction alone leaves refining and separation elsewhere; the fund and the tax treatment are aimed at keeping that stage in Brazil.

Energy Transfer wants Pennsylvania's Commonwealth Court to strike part of the state's Clean Streams Law, arguing the provision is too vague to satisfy due process under the state and federal constitutions, according to Inside Climate News, which described the suit as filed quietly in April.

The pipeline operator is under a state-level criminal probe over a jet fuel spill that contaminated drinking water in a suburban Philadelphia neighborhood, Inside Climate News reported.

Pennsylvania Attorney General Dave Sunday asked the court to throw the case out, describing the filing as an improper attempt "to pre-empt an anticipated criminal proceeding," per the same report.

When the Twin Oaks pipeline breach came to light, jet fuel was already in the drinking water wells of six homes in Upper Makefield Township, Bucks County, Inside Climate News reported. Testing since then has turned up benzene, xylenes and other toxic chemicals in wells serving at least 28 homes, and Energy Transfer has funded treatment systems at more than 200 homes as a safeguard against contamination, the outlet reported.

The January 2025 discovery of the underground spill followed 16 months of resident complaints about a gasoline smell and taste in their water, according to Inside Climate News, and multiple lawsuits center on the company's failure to detect the leak during that stretch.

Energy Transfer pleaded no contest in 2022 to a criminal case covering industrial waste spills and drinking water pollution at 22 sites in 11 Pennsylvania counties, the same reporting noted.