Coal

• NextDecade Corporation (NextDecade, the Company) (NASDAQ: NEXT) is proud to announce it has made a positive final investment decision (FID) to construct the first three liquefaction trains (Phase 1) at the Company’s 27 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) Rio Grande LNG (RGLNG) export facility in Brownsville, Texas.
• The $18.4 billion project financing for RGLNG Phase 1, is the largest greenfield energy project financing in U.S. history and underscores the critical role that LNG and natural gas will continue to play in the global energy transition.
• The Company believes these options with its partners will enable NextDecade to deliver the full FERC-approved five-train RGLNG project over time.
• MUFG Bank, Ltd. acted as financial advisor to NextDecade in connection with the debt financing and Macquarie Capital (USA) Inc. acted as financial advisor to NextDecade in connection with the equity financing.

• This article is part of La Conversation Canada’s series The boreal forest: A thousand secrets, a thousand dangers La Conversation Canada invites you to take a virtual walk in the heart of the boreal forest.
• It also avoids stoking the pervasive negative perceptions regarding wildfire, which in the boreal is an essential agent of forest renewal and health.
• As a team of scientists who have dedicated our careers to understanding changing boreal fire regimes, we decided to find out for ourselves.

Unusual fire behaviour

• Fire behaviour refers to the way a fire burns.
• This seemingly unusual fire behaviour was previously of limited concern as overwintering fires are hard to detect and, we think, were relatively infrequent.

Remote fire study

• Last summer, our team visited sites in the southern Northwest Territories that had ignited in 2014, experienced overwintering fire, and reignited in 2015.
• These were paired with neighbouring sites from the same 2014 fire that had experienced only a single season fire.
• All potential sites were incredibly remote and could only be accessed by helicopter — our team was able to use one that was on standby for fire duty as it was a relatively quiet fire season.

Carbon emissions

• The most socially relevant concern relates to carbon emissions and potential feedbacks to climate warming.
• Boreal peatlands are thought to store as much as 30 per cent of the Earth’s terrestrial carbon stocks.
• As such, threats to these regions have the potential to compound already rapid increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations that underlie global warming.

Failure to renew

• We expect that zombie fires will lead more commonly to regeneration failure — conversion of forest to non-forest — for three main reasons.
• Changes in forest type or failure for forests to recover affects wildlife habitat availability among other impacts, an issue of increasing concern, particularly in the context of declining caribou populations across North America.

Remote sensing advances

• However, advances in space-borne remote sensing have allowed the detection of early spring reignitions, which when combined with information on fire perimeters from the previous year, support accurate detection and mapping of overwintering fires that reignite.
• It will also lead to important insights into carbon losses from this fascinating — although poorly understood — fire behaviour.
• These research grants and contracts support fundamental research on the response of northern high latitude ecosystems to permafrost thaw and wildfire.

• In the Most Turbulent Year of Gas Markets History, LNG demonstrated essential value as a flexible, reliable, available energy resource for a secure energy transition
  VANCOUVER, BC , July 12, 2023 /PRNewswire/ - The International Gas Union (IGU) is releasing its 14th annual World LNG Report, the world's most comprehensive public source of information on key developments and trends in Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG).
• Europe provided higher price premiums than the rest of the world to attract additional LNG cargoes, and the US producers managed to export 55.2 MT to Europe, a 148% increase compared to 2021 levels, despite Freeport LNG in Texas being taken offline following an accident in June 2022.
• LNG volumes from the US accounted for 44% of Europe's total LNG imports while Europe accounted for 69% of total US LNG exports last year.
• "LNG kept the lights on in Europe last winter, but the lack of sufficient supply on the market also drove the world spot prices to record highs, and many consumers around the world had to choose dirtier fuels, or worse yet – shut down operations.

• Climate Change Misconceptions by Edward Rouse Pryor, explains how a several-hundred-year dual-magnetic-wave double-dynamo cycle within the sun that affects the extent of earth's cloud-cover is the dominant cause of current global warming and climate change.
• Greenhouse gas emissions do have an effect, but it is only trivial.
• The original tentative calculation of the climate change physics in 1997—which created so much alarm among environmentalists, and started the anthropogenic (human-induced) global warming and climate change "movement"—was recalculated in 2014 using updated and significantly improved data.
• This recalculation showed that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases have only about one-fifth the climate forcing power that was originally calculated in 1997.