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Tag: Alaska

  • Another big Alaska fossil fuel project gets Biden team’s blessing

    Another big Alaska fossil fuel project gets Biden team’s blessing

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    “Alaska LNG is a carbon bomb 10 times the size of Willow,” said Lukas Ross, program manager at the environmental advocacy group Friends of the Earth. “By rubber-stamping projects like these, Joe Biden is putting his own climate legacy at risk.”

    The White House did not comment on questions about Alaska LNG. The administration has previously pointed to the major actions it has taken to tackle climate change, such as making major investments in clean energy and opening more public land to wind and solar energy projects.

    But while Biden has pledged to move the United States away from fossil fuels, the country’s role as the world’s top natural gas producer has become a bright spot for the U.S. economy and a lifeline for allies in Europe and Asia, especially amid the disruptions caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine. Biden’s State Department and his ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emanuel, are among the project’s supporters.

    “Look, I’ve been critical of the Biden administration on a whole host of issues,” Alaska Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan, who has pitched the project to foreign companies and governments, said in an interview. “But this even has the strong support of the Biden administration.”

    Government financing from last year’s landmark climate law and the 2021 infrastructure package have also improved the outlook for the plant, for instance by offering expanded tax credits for carbon-capture technology.

    The project, which still faces major economic challenges, would ship 3.5 billion cubic feet a day of liquefied natural gas produced in the state’s North Slope. Buyers in Japan, South Korea and elsewhere are giving the project a close look, people in the industry said.

    The momentum is a sharp change from 2019, when the company behind the project laid off half its staff and indefinitely delayed a final investment decision. At the time, the Trump administration’s steel tariffs and the trade war with major gas consumer China were creating uncertainty about the project’s future.

    Environmental groups point to estimates from the Energy Department that the project would spew the equivalent of 1.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over its 30-year lifetime, even if it uses carbon capture technology. That’s akin to burning more than 8 million rail cars full of coal.

    Green groups say the administration’s approval of the Willow project and its breakneck pace of approving permits to drill for oil and gas on public land are in stark contrast to Biden’s own words.

    On Thursday, Biden pledged $1 billion to help developing countries fight climate change and renewed his call for more clean energy development.

    “We can keep the goal of limiting warming to just no more than 1.5 degrees,” Biden said at the 2023 Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, a virtual gathering that included leaders of Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and the European Union.

    Oregon Democratic Sen. Jeff Merkley, who sits on the Senate Environment and Public Works and Foreign Relations committees, rebuked the Energy Department’s decision to approve a key permit for the Alaska gas project. The permit allows the project’s backers to ship gas to most countries around the world.

    “Another massive fossil project from a president who promised to drive the transition to renewables!” Merkley tweeted last month. “We have to lead by the power of our example—this is exactly the wrong example for the world!”

    The project’s backers say Alaska LNG would be one of the cleanest sources of natural gas. Wells in the North Slope already have enough natural gas to make new drilling unnecessary, and the carbon capture technology the project plans to use will help cut emissions, they said.

    The project as first proposed in 2012 always had a strategic appeal to investors. It would be close to Alaska’s mammoth natural gas reserves, and its location along the West Coast would significantly cut the shipping costs and time needed to transport U.S. natural gas to the Asian countries that are the biggest LNG market in the world.

    But what looked good as a blueprint never really penciled out in the ledger books, with its massive price tag deemed too large for investors. Especially daunting was the 800-mile pipeline that would be needed to transport the gas from Alaska’s North Slope to a liquefaction plant and export facility in Cook Inlet along that state’s southern coast. Alaska’s remote geography and brutal winters make any construction project more costly than it would be in the lower 48 states.

    A lot has changed in the past 18 months, however. Sullivan and fellow Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski included language in the bipartisan infrastructure law that made Alaska LNG eligible for billions of dollars in federal loan guarantees, Sullivan said. Then Democrats included a tax credit in the Inflation Reduction Act, H.R. 5376 (117), for carbon capture technology that Alaska LNG’s backers say could generate $600 million a year for the project.

    Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent global energy markets into a tailspin. Japan, South Korea and European countries have scrambled to source alternative supplies of natural gas to replace what they have stopped taking from Russia. And with Alaska LNG being the only new, fully permitted gas export plant on the U.S. West Coast, Asian buyers in particular are giving the project a long look, said Frank Richards, senior vice president for project developer Alaska Gasline Development Corp.

    “Out of the calamity of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, we’ve seen a very positive increase of interest from buyers who don’t want to rely on adversarial countries for their energy supply,” Richards said in an interview. “Now those countries are seeing opportunities in Alaska LNG as a West Coast Pacific project.”

    “We’re poised to be ready to go to a final investment decision,” Richards added.

    Just as importantly, project backers say, State Department officials in the Biden administration have thrown their support behind the project.

    Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, convened an Alaska LNG Summit in Tokyo in October that brought together project officials, State Department energy security coordinator Amos Hochstein and Assistant Secretary for Energy Resources Geoffrey Pyatt with representatives of Japan’s Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry. Major Japanese gas-importing companies including JERA and Tokyo Gas also attended, Sullivan and Richards said.

    Also attending were representatives from investment bank Goldman Sachs, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and private equity firm BlackRock, according to summaries of the meeting.

    Neither the White House nor State Department offered comment on the meeting. But in a December op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Emanuel singled out Alaska LNG as a potential source for gas for Japan as the country seeks to reduce its use of coal. He is expected to discuss Alaska LNG at an energy conference in Anchorage next month, project backers said.

    “Alaska LNG can travel to Japan in six days without any strategic chokepoints and can make Japan the energy export hub for the Indo-Pacific to reduce its coal dependency,” Emanuel wrote in the newspaper.

    Sullivan, who said he helped organize the meeting with Emanuel, said the presence of the Biden official and Emanuel’s continued promotion of the project have helped ease foreign buyers’ fears that the Biden administration would abruptly kill the project.

    “Japan and Korea want to see that federal government support,” he said.

    Representatives of METI, the Japanese government agency in charge of setting energy policy, declined to comment on the meeting in Tokyo.

    While the reshaping of global energy markets amid the war in Ukraine and the political and financial help from the federal government have improved Alaska LNG’s prospects, high costs could still tank it, analysts warn.

    “Proximity to growing demand and resource depth make the project appealing, but complexity and cost create offsetting risks,” said Kevin Book, managing director of the consulting firm ClearView Energy. “And amid higher interest rates, bigger can be harder.”

    But the project’s backers and detractors both agree that Alaska LNG is much closer to the finish line now than it had been four years ago.

    “The State Department seems to be driving an agenda of exporting as much U.S.-produced methane gas as possible regardless of the climate impact,” said Alan Zibel, energy research director at progressive advocacy group Public Citizen. “The last thing the Biden administration should be doing is getting in bed with the oil and gas industry to export climate destroying methane gas.”



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Biden’s green allies promise lawsuit over Alaska oil project

    Biden’s green allies promise lawsuit over Alaska oil project

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    Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan (R) — a staunch Willow supporter — said he was already preparing to help defend the Biden administration from “frivolous legal challenges” against the $8 billion project.

    “We are coordinated and ready to defend this decision,” he told reporters Monday.

    Biden officials have sought to balance interest in continued leasing in oil- and gas-producing states like Alaska with the president’s clean energy priorities. Environmentalists who have generally backed the president’s climate initiatives have also repeatedly pushed the federal government to go even further by eliminating new oil and gas leasing on federally controlled lands.

    Cancellation of the Willow project would have been a key win to block future fossil fuel extraction on public lands. Now environmentalists’ pressure campaign against the project is transitioning to legal action against the approval process by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management.

    Trustees for Alaska, which successfully sued to block a Trump-era Willow approval in 2020, is reviewing whether the Biden administration’s green light for the project fully complies with an earlier court order. A federal judge in 2021 blocked Willow after finding that BLM had failed to conduct an adequate analysis of the project’s environmental impacts.

    Judge Sharon Gleason of the U.S. District Court for the District of Alaska sent BLM back to the drawing board after finding the agency had not done enough to model the impact of the project on foreign emissions, properly weigh alternative designs or approve a project that provided maximal surface area protections within the leasing area.

    BLM’s court-ordered environmental review did address the greenhouse gas modeling concerns, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other potential problems with the agency’s emissions and impact analysis under the National Environmental Policy Act, said Psarianos of Trustees for Alaska. NEPA requires agencies to take a “hard look” at environmental impacts of major federal actions but does not require a specific outcome for a project.

    “We have some big, big questions about whether they actually complied with the NEPA requirement to assess impacts from those greenhouse gas emissions, even if they accurately quantified them,” she said.

    Environmental groups will also be looking at how BLM responded within its final approval — known as a record of decision, or ROD — to Gleason’s finding that the agency had misinterpreted its statutory authority to assume ConocoPhillips had the right to extract all the oil and gas that was under its lease.

    “The ROD does try to grapple with that,” said Psarianos.

    BLM stated that its project screening criteria were “reevaluated and augmented” to address the court’s concerns about the amount of extraction approved under the Trump administration.

    “That’s something we’re going to have to look at and dig into and see, whether that’s defensible for them,” Psarianos said.

    Environmental groups will also be looking at compliance under other statutes such as the Naval Petroleum Reserves Production Act, which outlines conservation requirements specifically for the Alaska petroleum reserve, also referred to as the NPR-A.

    In its new record of decision released Monday, BLM said it had responded to the concerns raised by Gleason, who was appointed during the Obama administration, and was moving forward with an alternative Willow design that “requires the fewest ice roads, fewest total miles of infield pipelines, least water use, fewest vehicle trips, fewest fixed-wing aircraft trips, fewest helicopter trips, and fewest acres of screeding.”

    The project design no longer allows gravel fill in a marine area and reduces the number of facilities, water and gravel use, and operational activities. The changes “reduce impacts to important surface resources and subsistence uses as compared to the other action alternatives,” BLM said.

    The approved alternative also had the least total greenhouse gas emissions, making the decision to move forward with the project “consistent with the principles and objectives” in 2021 climate orders issued by President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, according to BLM.

    Willow will include nearly 200 oil wells along with other supporting infrastructure. ConocoPhillips also added three boat ramps to help offset the impacts of the project to the Alaska Native community of Nuiqsut. The tiny city is located closest to the development, and its residents have strongly opposed Willow for its impacts on subsistence hunting and fishing — even as many other Alaska Native leaders have backed the project.

    BLM’s final approval includes two fewer drilling sites than what was proposed by ConocoPhillips under the Trump administration. The company had previously warned the Biden administration that approving fewer than three well sites would not be economically viable.

    ConocoPhillips praised the Biden administration’s decision Monday, saying it was compatible with White House climate and energy policies.

    ‘Huge disappointment’

    In a separate announcement Monday, the White House said it plans to protect 16 million acres of public lands and federal waters from oil and gas development — although environmental groups say the move does not offset their concerns about Willow.

    The Biden administration indefinitely withdrew 2.8 million acres of the Beaufort Sea from oil and gas leasing and announced plans for a new rulemaking to consider conservation measures for more than 13 million acres in the NPR-A that serves as important habitat for grizzly and polar bears, as well as caribou and migratory waterfowl.

    “Today’s withdrawal ensures this important habitat for whales, seals, polar bears as well as for subsistence purposes will be protected in perpetuity from extractive development,” the White House said in a memorandum.

    Psarianos said that the entire western Arctic deserves protection from oil and gas drilling.

    “The Willow approvals … would unlock a large area for industrial development,” she said. “That just in and of itself is a completely unacceptable threat for the reserve, to subsistence and to the climate.”

    Environmentalists said the Biden administration’s approval of the Willow project is in line with other oil and gas leasing decisions from Interior.

    “President Biden’s decision to approve the massive Willow fossil fuel project is undoubtedly a blow to our collective ability to address the climate crisis,” Jim Walsh, policy director of Food and Water Watch, said in a statement. “But this administration has not yet demonstrated a strong commitment to stopping new fossil fuel projects.”

    The Biden administration has already faced a series of lawsuits challenging its analysis of the risks of oil and gas leasing.

    That has included litigation over Lease Sale 258 in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, the recent lawsuit against Lease Sale 259 in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as other challenges to onshore leases and drilling permits, said Kristen Monsell, oceans program litigation director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

    Monsell said that the Biden administration’s approval of drilling permits on public lands has outpaced the rate under former President Donald Trump.

    “The Biden administration has been a huge disappointment,” she said.

    Emma Dumain contributed to this report.

    A version of this report first ran in E&E News’ Energywire. Get access to more comprehensive and in-depth reporting on the energy transition, natural resources, climate change and more in E&E News.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Biden expected to OK Alaska oil project — a blow to his green base

    Biden expected to OK Alaska oil project — a blow to his green base

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    Biden pledged to halt new oil and gas development on federal land during his 2020 campaign, and he and Democrats in Congress passed landmark climate legislation last summer aimed at weaning huge swaths of the economy off of fossil fuels. But the surge in oil prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced the administration into an awkward embrace of the oil industry, as Biden countered Republican accusations that his policies were to blame for the skyrocketing price at the gas pump that was stoking inflation.

    Approving Willow would be just the latest shift by Biden toward the political center as he moves toward a potential reelection bid. He similarly dismayed liberals last week by saying he would not veto a GOP-led repeal of changes to D.C.’s criminal code.

    The White House defended Biden’s environmental record Saturday in comments to POLITICO, saying Biden’s policies have made the U.S. “a magnet for clean energy manufacturing and jobs” with policies that help the U.S. come closer to meeting climate goals. A White House official said that using oil and gas is still consistent with Biden’s near- and long-term emissions targets, which the official said the U.S. is on track to meet.

    “This approach has not changed — nor will it. Our climate goals are cutting emissions in half by 2030 and reaching net-zero by 2050 — not 2023,” the official said. “That has always meant that oil will continue to be a part of the energy mix in the short-term while we shore up domestic clean energy production for the long-term.”

    Environmental groups acknowledged Saturday that they were largely in the dark about the White House’s plans, but said they believed that the current discussions inside the administration were largely over whether to limit the number of drilling sites at the Willow project to two rather than three. Conoco had proposed building five well pads.

    “It sounds like different groups in the White House are still discussing” the potential size of the project, said one environmental advocate who had been in contact with the administration late Friday.

    “They told us they had nothing to offer” on the state of project deliberations, added the person, who was granted anonymity to describe internal White House deliberations.

    But if the reports of the approval are true, Biden’s shift to the center on oil would threaten to demoralize the climate activists he needs to support him in 2024, said Jamal Raad, co-founder and senior adviser of the group Evergreen Action.

    “It will be harder for us and climate activists to rally around this president come next year,” Raad said, explaining the action would detract from his many accomplishments, such as the $370 billion in climate and clean energy incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act, while putting the onus on Biden to issue tougher environmental rules on cars and power plants.

    Conoco declined to comment until it hears a decision directly from the administration.

    Conoco Chief Executive Ryan Lance last week urged the administration to approve Willow, saying the project was in line with the Biden administration’s recent exhortations to the industry to increase oil production to help batten down prices.

    “This is exactly what this administration has been asking our industry to do over the last couple of years,” Lance told an energy conference in Houston.

    Regardless of the size, any plan would call for drilling oil and building miles of pipelines and roads, a gravel pit, an air strip and other infrastructure in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, a 36,875-square-mile patch of federal land in the relatively undeveloped Arctic wilderness. It would produce as much as 600,000 barrels of oil over its three-decade lifetime.

    The project would also add nearly 280 million tons of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere over that period, according to the Interior Department’s environmental analysis. That would be the equivalent of adding two new coal-fired power plants to the U.S. electricity system every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s emissions calculator.

    The National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, originally set aside by the Harding administration for potential oil drilling in 1923, is outside the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, another swath of northern Alaska that Biden has declared off-limits for oil development.

    Environmentalists said they were still holding onto hope based on the administration’s denial that it made a final decision to OK the project, despite multiple news reports saying that an announcement of the approval would be made in the coming days. (Bloomberg News first reported Friday night that the administration had decided to greenlight it.)

    “Great! Then there is still time to turn this all around!!!” Natural Resources Defense Council spokesperson Anne Hawke posted on Twitter after White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre denied on Friday that a final decision had been made.

    Hawke also reached out to Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg for help persuading Biden, tweeting at the young advocate: “In just days, the US will approve a massive oil project in Alaska. Can you help us tell US @POTUS to #StopWillowProject?”

    Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), a longtime climate advocate, expressed dismay at the news.

    “We cannot allow the Willow Project to move forward,” he tweeted late Friday. “We must build a clean energy future — not return to a dark, fossil-fueled past.”

    An approval, if it comes, would infuriate environmental groups and continue a year-long strengthening of the administration’s relationship with the oil industry. But it would also come as market analysts are forecasting that oil prices will remain volatile for the next several years, which would make killing the project politically tricky.

    Biden himself has softened his rhetoric on transitioning the country away from fossil fuels, and he has repeatedly pressed the oil and gas industry to increase production in the short term to keep prices lower.

    “We are still going to need oil and gas for a while.” he said during his State of the Union speech last month.

    The Willow development is the rare large-scale oil project to be announced in recent years in the United States, where the industry has instead shifted its focus to drilling smaller, cheaper and faster projects using fracking to tap into shale fields in the Southwest. If approved, construction could start soon, and additional construction in Alaska’s North Slope for Willow will occur throughout the summer and fall, the company has said.

    Alaskan native tribes have expressed split opinions on the project, with some warning it would degrade their environment and others welcoming its potential economic gains.

    “The Willow Project is a new opportunity to ensure a viable future for our communities, creating generational economic stability for our people and advancing our self-determination,” said Nagruk Harcharek, president of the nonprofit Voice of Arctic Iñupiat, in a statement Saturday. “North Slope Iñupiat communities have waited nearly a generation for Willow to advance.”

    Yet that urgency to develop the project, and the signals from the White House, were disheartening to environmental groups.

    “To us, it all sucks because it flies in the face of meeting our climate goals. So we’re going to keep fighting until there is a final record of decision,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, senior vice president of government affairs with the League of Conservation Voters.

    Some of Biden’s green allies suggested the move could have repercussions for Democrats in 2024. Along with the long-debated Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, which Biden effectively killed in one of his first acts as president, Willow has joined the ranks of fossil fuel projects that in earlier decades would have flown under radar but have now taken on outsized political significance.

    The Biden administration is caught in the middle, hyping the Inflation Reduction Act it signed into law as the biggest climate-related legislation ever but also asking companies to keep pumping barrels to keep fuel prices low in the here-and-now. That law has also won praise from the oil and gas sector for its incentives for carbon capture and storage and clean hydrogen – technologies the fossil fuel producers are pursuing.

    Raad, from Evergreen Action, said the Willow project “was something that really took the internet and social media by storm the last few weeks – because it is a physical thing and a physical place that feels real.” And that has implications for Biden’s hopes for reelection, he added.

    “There’s just no escaping the fact that we’re going to need to rally young folks and folks interested in climate next year to win,” Raad said. “And this does not help in any shape or form.”

    As of March 2, environmental advocates were citing 9,000 videos protesting Willow on the social media platform TikTok. Former Vice President Al Gore earlier this week weighed in to say it would be “recklessly irresponsible” to approve Willow.

    Deirdre Shelly, campaigns director with the youth environmental group Sunrise Movement, said her organization is already strategizing for the next election and that approving Willow would make organizers’ jobs more difficult.

    “This is just a huge disappointment. … It does feel like an about-face,” she said. “It makes it even harder for us to convince young people that they need to vote, that the Democratic Party leaders will act on climate.”

    But the administration also felt heavy pressure from the oil industry and the state’s politically powerful Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski. Murkowski has long championed Willow as a needed boost to the Alaskan economy, which has been troubled for years as the overall oil industry has picked up stakes to move to the cheaper opportunities in the Lower 48.

    Oil and gas companies and energy-state lawmakers would have been ready to blame the rejection of Willow for any subsequent rise in energy costs, even though the Biden Interior Department has approved new permits to drill on public land at a faster rate than his predecessors.

    Murkowski, speaking Friday in Houston before the announcement, said she had met with the White House last week to warn that the administration was legally bound to approve the project, given that Conoco held oil leases on federal land.

    “The fact of the matter is these are valid existing leases that Conoco holds,” Murkowski told reporters. “If the administration [had] basically not allowed them to be able to access those leases, what follows then? … Alaska litigation is always something that we have to reckon with.”

    Catherine Morehouse contributed to this report.



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • U.S. ends search for objects shot down over Alaska, Lake Huron

    U.S. ends search for objects shot down over Alaska, Lake Huron

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    The announcement capped three dramatic weeks that saw U.S. fighter jets shoot down four airborne objects — a large Chinese balloon on Feb. 4 and three much smaller objects about a week later over Canada, Alaska and Lake Huron. They are the first known peacetime shootdowns of unauthorized objects in U.S. airspace.

    U.S. officials said Friday that efforts to recover the remnants of the large balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina had ended, and analysis of the debris so far reinforces conclusions that it was a Chinese spy balloon.

    Officials said the U.S. believes that Navy, Coast Guard and FBI personnel collected all of the balloon debris off the ocean floor, which included key equipment from the payload that could reveal what information it was able to monitor and collect. White House national security spokesman John Kirby said a significant amount of debris was recovered and it included “electronics and optics” from the payload. He declined to say what, if anything, the U.S. has learned from the wreckage so far.

    U.S. Northern Command said in a statement that the recovery operations ended Thursday and the final pieces are on their way to the FBI lab in Virginia for analysis. It said air and maritime restrictions off South Carolina have been lifted.

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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )

  • Military shoots down ‘high altitude object’ over Alaska

    Military shoots down ‘high altitude object’ over Alaska

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    National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby said Friday the object was flying at 40,000 feet “and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of the civilian flight.” President Joe Biden, following the Pentagon’s recommendation, ordered that the object be shot down.

    Kirby said the object was much smaller than the Chinese spy balloon — about the “size of a small car” as opposed to the “two or three buses size” Chinese balloon.

    The object was spotted Thursday night and the president was briefed shortly after. According to a senior military official, the military picked up the object using a ground-based radar and F-35 fighter jets to observe it.

    On Friday, U.S. Northern Command on Friday scrambled two F-22 fighter jets to intercept the object over northeastern part of Alaska, near Canada. It was shot down around 1:45 p.m. Eastern time. Efforts are underway to attempt to recover the debris where it fell onto a frozen region of territorial waters.

    Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon, spokesperson Brig. Gen. Patrick Ryder said after the military determined the object was not manned, one of the two F-22 jets fired a Sidewinder missile to take it down. It was the same type of jet and missile that took down the spy balloon last Saturday.

    One senior administration official, who also asked to remain anonymous, said that once the military finds whatever is left of the object, a better identification might be possible. “They need to see it up close, it’s so small. We will get more clarity.”

    Neither Kirby nor Ryder would venture to guess what the object was, or who launched it. “We don’t have any information that would confirm a stated purpose for this object,” Kirby said.

    Kirby said Biden’s primary reason for ordering the military to shoot the object down “was the safety of flight issue.” The Chinese spy balloon last week flew much higher, around 60,000 feet, well above the altitude for commercial air traffic.

    Kirby emphasized the differences between this object and the Chinese balloon, noting repeatedly the smaller size of the new object and that it was over water when Biden ordered to shoot it down. The president faced criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for the delay in shooting down the Chinese balloon, which flew over Canada and the U.S. for a week before the fighter jet shot it down over water.

    On Friday, Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) applauded the military for taking quick action.

    “As I’ve been doing for the past week, including in a classified briefing with senior Pentagon officials yesterday, I strongly encouraged the NORTHCOM Cmdr this morning to shoot down this latest unidentified intrusion into Alaska air space. I commend them for doing so today.”

    On Friday, the Biden administration unveiled its first official retaliation against Beijing for sending a spy balloon over U.S. territory, adding six Chinese aerospace companies to a commercial blacklist for their support of government surveillance programs.

    The Commerce Department announced that U.S. companies would be barred from doing business with the six listed companies unless they receive special licenses.

    The Chinese companies were slapped with the designation “for their support to China’s military modernization efforts, specifically the People’s Liberation Army’s aerospace programs including airships and balloons and related materials and components,” the Commerce Department said in a statement. The agency noted that the People’s Liberation Army is using high-altitude balloons “for intelligence and reconnaissance activities.”

    Kirby on Friday defended that decision to wait to shoot down the Chinese spy balloon, saying the Pentagon knew the airship’s basic flight path and was able “significantly curtail any intelligence ability that the Chinese could get from the balloon.”

    He said the information gleaned from surveilling the balloon did not provide insights for the detection and track of the new object on Friday.

    “At this time, all I can tell you is it did not appear to have the ability to independently maneuver,” Kirby said. “We’ll attempt recovery and see what we can learn more from.”

    Alexander Ward, Lara Seligman and Gavin Bade contributed to this report.



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    ( With inputs from : www.politico.com )