(Houston) The United States will take the lead in the energy transition under the leadership of the Biden government, US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Wednesday.
“The United States is going to be the world leader in this transition,” said the US Secretary of Energy during a speech at the CERAWeek energy conference in Houston, Texas.
Mme Granholm recalled that under the mandate of President Joe Biden, the American Congress had adopted an infrastructure investment plan in 2021, then the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), focusing in particular on the energy transition.
In total, these two legislative packages provide an envelope of nearly 500 billion dollars in grants, loans and tax incentives to accelerate the development of renewable energies, carbon neutralization techniques and storage and transport infrastructure.
“The Biden government has made the United States the most attractive destination for new energy and decarbonization technologies,” argued Jennifer Granholm.
“In many cases, many cases, this makes the United States irresistible” for foreign investors and industrialists, hammered the secretary.
Many elected officials and foreign politicians, particularly in Europe, have expressed reservations about the IRA, sometimes accused of penalizing other countries and regions by massively subsidizing the energy transition.
“The (European) companies love” the American measures, “the governments, not so much”, joked the Energy Secretary.
“We tell them: go ahead, do the same. Incentivize (fiscally) the production of clean energies in your countries”, she continued, describing the situation as “friendly competition”.
“We will continue to work with our partners,” she nevertheless tempered. “We don’t want to start a trade war. »
Last year, in the early days of the war in Ukraine, Mr.me Granholm had gone to CERAWeek to publicly urge the oil and gas sector to increase production.
On Wednesday, she said she was pleased with the increase in volumes produced over the past year in the United States, both in oil and gas, and the prospects for an increase this year and next, according to the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) estimates.
“It has helped our partners” avoid energy shortages, and, in the United States, “it has helped limit price volatility at the pump. »