Today in Energy

The most recent Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) quarterly auction (held on December 1, 2021) resulted in a clearing price of $13.00 per allowance, surpassing the previous auction's record price of $9.30 per allowance. Each allowance represents a limited authorization for power plants to emit one short ton of CO2.

After declining in 2020, the combined production of U.S. fossil fuels (including natural gas, crude oil, and coal) increased by 2% in 2021 to 77.14 quadrillion British thermal units. Based on forecasts in our latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), we expect U.S. fossil fuel production to continue rising in both 2022 and 2023, surpassing production in 2019, to reach a new record in 2023.

In our latest Short-Term Energy Outlook, we forecast that U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions will increase in both 2022 and 2023 but remain below 2019 levels. In 2020, U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions decreased by 11% as energy use declined during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the U.S. economy began to return to pre-COVID activity, CO2 emissions increased by an estimated 6% in 2021. We expect increasing economic activity, along with other factors, will result in those emissions increasing by another 2% in 2022 and remaining virtually flat in 2023.

In 2021, pipeline companies completed 14 petroleum liquids pipelines projects in the United States, according to our recently updated Liquids Pipeline Projects Database. This total includes seven crude oil pipeline projects and seven hydrocarbon gas liquids pipeline projects; no petroleum product pipeline projects were completed last year.

In our January Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO), we forecast that increasing electricity generation from renewable energy resources such as solar and wind will reduce generation from fossil fuel-fired power plants over the next two years. The forecast share of generation for U.S. non-hydropower renewable sources, including solar and wind, grows from 13% in 2021 to 17% in 2023. We forecast that the share of generation from natural gas will fall from 37% in 2021 to 34% by 2023 and the coal share will decline from 23% to 22%.