The plant will cut CO₂ emissions compared to traditional coal furnaces. But Hyundai’s use of gas and resulting pollution show the messiness of cleaning up steel.

Hyundai is set to break ground in southern Louisiana this week on a nearly $6 billion steel mill, which may become the lowest-carbon facility of its kind in the U.S.

On Friday, the Korean industrial giant will hold a ceremony at the project site, where the fields of a former sugarcane plantation have been cleared for the major work ahead. Hyundai’s plant will initially run on natural gas when it opens in 2029 — making it significantly less carbon-intensive than the aging coal-fueled mills that produce most of America’s automotive steel.

Yet the facility is hardly a perfect blueprint for decarbonizing steel production, given that it will still produce planet-warming emissions and other harmful air pollution.

Most of the Louisiana plant’s emissions will come from the gas-burning furnace that turns iron ore into direct-reduced iron — which then gets melted into steel in an electric arc furnace. The project is one of several huge new developments in Ascension Parish, where rural communities along the Mississippi River are increasingly being hemmed in by industrialization.

“Even though Hyundai has tried to sell this as a clean and green project, we know from their own numbers that this facility would be a major source of just about every type of pollution that the state regulates,” said Kimberly Terrell, a New Orleans–based research scientist with the Environmental Integrity Project’s Center for Applied Environmental Science.

That pollution includes emissions of nitrogen oxide, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide, each of which is known to cause respiratory problems and other serious health issues, she told reporters ahead of Friday’s groundbreaking.

Terrell said she believes the plant’s draft environmental permit downplays the steel mill’s potential impacts on nearby air quality. Local residents have also voiced concerns that the project is moving forward before the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality has the chance to rigorously review and issue a final air permit.

“Development should improve our communities, not leave families wondering what the long-term cost will be to their children,” said Courtney Harris, a program manager for Rural Roots Louisiana and a resident of Donaldsonville, the nearest city to Hyundai’s steel mill site.

Hyundai-Posco Louisiana Steel, the U.S.-based subsidiary of Hyundai Steel, said the company has ​“made every effort to ensure that our project meets environmental standards and complies with all applicable regulatory requirements. We respect the permitting process and will continue to follow all required procedures as it moves forward,” according to Ascension Business Report. (Hyundai didn’t return Canary Media’s request for comment.)

The steelmaker could drastically reduce both air and carbon pollution in Louisiana by replacing the gas with green hydrogen — which is made from renewable electricity and water, and whose only byproduct is water vapor. When Hyundai first unveiled the project in early 2025, it indicated the plant would use the carbon-free fuel and become a ​“catalyst for the hydrogen ecosystem” in the Bayou State.

However, Hyundai’s plans for switching to hydrogen remain nebulous, and the broader market for green hydrogen continues to face major cost and logistical hurdles. The manufacturer has offered little clarity about its hydrogen ambitions in its state permit applications and in previous responses to Canary Media.

But Hyundai’s gas-fueled mill will nevertheless be much cleaner than traditional coal-based steelmaking. The company says its steel products will have a carbon footprint that’s 70% lower than those produced using conventional methods.

That may be the best the U.S. can get right now, experts say.

Earlier efforts to pursue hydrogen-based steelmaking have stalled in the face of economic headwinds and the Trump administration’s hostility toward clean energy. Cleveland-Cliffs, which got a $500 million Biden-era grant to install hydrogen-ready technology, says it will instead use the funding to upgrade a coal-fueled blast furnace in southern Ohio.

As manufacturers look to boost domestic steel production — driven by tariffs and increasing demand — they’re primarily planning to build gas-fueled ironmaking furnaces like Hyundai’s.

U.S. Steel, for example, says it will invest nearly $2 billion to build a direct-reduced-iron plant at its Big River Steel site in Arkansas, where four electric arc furnaces already melt down scrap steel. In Minnesota, the mining company Mesabi Metallics is considering installing such a furnace at its giant operation in the Iron Range.

“The industry is naturally moving towards [direct-reduced-iron] based production for cost and efficiency reasons, leveraging low-cost natural gas that we have in the United States,” said Nick Yavorsky, a senior associate on the iron and steel team at RMI, a clean energy think tank.

“We’re still not at the point where hydrogen-based steelmaking is cost-competitive with incumbent fossil methods,” he said.

Even so, new facilities can be designed in ways that avoid locking companies into using natural gas for decades and help ease the transition to hydrogen, Yavorsky wrote in a July analysis with Kaitlyn Ramirez, who leads the RMI team. That could include leaving land available for hydrogen-producing electrolyzers and working with utilities early on to secure renewable energy supplies — as well as taking cues from Hyundai’s project, which will deploy hydrogen-ready furnace technology and electrify certain steps of steel processing.

“Planning for flexibility [around hydrogen] will ultimately have the potential to position the U.S. as a real leader in this space,” Ramirez said.

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North Plains Connector has earned backing from the Energy Department and utilities, and could deliver huge cost and reliability benefits — if states give it the OK.

Michael Skelly knows it’s hard to build a huge transmission line that connects different regions of the grid. He has spent a decade trying to get one up and running.

But Skelly, now CEO of Grid United, thinks his current attempt to build a first-of-its-kind transmission line is on the right track. And he’s gotten a consortium of utilities from Minnesota to Oregon, and officials in the U.S. Department of Energy through both the Biden and Trump administrations, to back it up.

Grid United’s North Plains Connector will be a 420-mile, 3-gigawatt high-voltage direct current (HVDC) link between Montana and North Dakota. It will require an estimated $6 billion in investment across both states, and won’t be completed until 2032 at the earliest.

When it’s done, North Plains Connector will be able to share power between three grid regions spanning three time zones across the U.S. West, Great Plains, and Upper Midwest. Today, such region-spanning connections are extremely rare. But study after study has shown they can yield major benefits that extend far beyond the states the line transects.

“If you connect two grids whose peak moments are at two different times, you create an ability for the grids to lean on one another,” Skelly said.

The reliability and cost benefits that could flow from linking entire regions are almost certainly substantial. But it’s hard to quantify all the good that can come from such links when they have never existed before — and utilities and regulators want to be able to clearly define long-term benefits before they approve major investments.

Grid United’s solution is to front the costs for getting the project off the ground while trying to convince utilities to join in paying for a portion. Financing from the DOE is helping immensely with navigating these early costs and risks — and in getting utilities on board.

Back in 2024, the DOE awarded a $700 million grant to the consortium, including Grid United and the Montana Department of Commerce, which is the lead agency for administering the award. And last week, the DOE published a final environmental impact statement for the project, helped along by a federal interagency process launched under the Biden administration.

The Trump administration has continued to work with Grid United, even as it has clawed back or delayed billions of dollars in other Biden-era grants and terminated a $4.9 billion DOE loan for the Grain Belt Express, another massive HVDC line meant to carry wind and solar energy from the Great Plains to states farther east.

For North Plains Connector, having that federal money available ​“is quite helpful to the utilities that are participating in the project as they go through regulatory approvals,” Skelly said. Regulators ​“want their states to get their fair share, if you will — and they also want customers whose utilities are paying for the project to not have to pay for the whole thing.”

This combination of the DOE and Grid United taking on the early costs and risks has given a growing list of utilities enough confidence to make at least conditional commitments to pay for a piece of the project once it’s finished.

Some of them are directly involved in the states where it’s being built, such as Minnkota Power Cooperative and NorthWestern Energy. While others — such as Allete Energy and Great River Energy in Minnesota, Portland General Electric in Oregon, and Puget Sound Energy in Washington state — are joining up to earn a share of the reliability and cost benefits that will flow indirectly from the project and across the grid regions it will link.

Those far-off utilities don’t need to draw power directly from the end points of the HVDC line to gain the benefits, said Gretchen Kershaw, chief operating officer at consultancy Grid Strategies, which is not involved in the project. That’s because HVDC lines enable two-way flows of power that can energize and backfill shortfalls across entire regional grid networks.

Being able to tap into generation well beyond their borders makes it easier for utilities to deal with disruption or demand spikes caused by intense weather events like winter storms or heat waves. That’s one of the benefits cited for North Plains Connector in last month’s draft National Transmission Needs Study, the most recent in a series of DOE reports highlighting the value of these kinds of interregional connections.

“The most reliable and resilient system will have diversity in generation supply, both in terms of types of generation and location,” said Kershaw, who previously worked as a senior adviser to the DOE’s Grid Deployment Office, which was the source of the North Plains Connector grant but disbanded by the Trump administration last year. ​“You’re essentially able to make the system bigger, with generators and customers on both sides, and weather systems that are different at both ends.”

Those are some of the benefits that drew Allete to partner on the North Plains Connector project in 2023.

“We knew this energy transformation happening in our nation is going to require people to go well beyond the boundaries of their previous business and service territories,” said Julie Pierce, vice president of strategy and planning for the utility and energy company.

Allete owns Minnesota Power, a utility serving about 150,000 customers, as well as renewable energy subsidiaries including wind farms in North Dakota, which happen to be connected with a decades-old HVDC line to its Minnesota territory.

Allete is also part of a group of utilities that developed a large-scale, multi-utility grid-expansion plan in the early 2000s, which helped lay the groundwork for billions of dollars in additional regional transmission buildouts in the Midwest, Pierce said.

A key step in convincing other utilities to sign on is figuring out how to measure the new interregional line’s resource adequacy value. That’s the term of art for how utilities ensure they can keep their grids running during times of high demand, power plant outages, severe weather, or other emergencies.

“It’s so massive, it’s hard to put boundaries around what it’s going to enable,” Pierce said. ​“How do you value the ability to keep lights on in the Upper Midwest when there’s a storm coming through, but you’re able to import that solar from California?”

That work has some clear starting points, she said. Utilities can start to incorporate the reliability value of their share of the line into the integrated resource plans they file with state regulators, which lay out how much new generation and grid investment they need to make over the next decade or more.

North Plains Connector has its work cut out for it beyond measuring resource adequacy. Before it can break ground, it must make agreements with landowners along the path of the line, secure state and local permits, and win final regulatory approvals from both states it passes through.

“These projects take many years to put together,” Skelly said.

Indeed, high-profile transmission lines like the SunZia project from New Mexico to California and the Champlain Hudson Power Express from Canada to New York City have taken more than a decade from inception to completion. Many transmission projects fail to overcome hurdles. Skelly’s previous company, Clean Line Energy Partners, shut down in 2019 after failing to complete five power lines to carry 16.5 GW of wind power across the Midwest.

But if North Plains Connector can get connected, ​“the project will be online for 30 years,” he said. ​“What does generation in America look like in 2050? I don’t know. But it’s very likely we have very different demand profiles in each system, and whatever generation we have in that time, we’ll be better able to optimize if we have a great grid to lean on.”

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Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee is the first Democrat targeted by the Invest in Tomorrow Coalition, which has notched wins against clean energy foes in GOP primaries.

The troubled reelection campaign of Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee is facing a new obstacle: a super PAC determined to take down foes of clean energy.

The Invest in Tomorrow Coalition has declared McKee its first Democratic target, following campaigns against three Republican primary candidates, all of whom lost their races. The political action committee announced this week that it is spending $500,000 to air ads opposing McKee in advance of the Sept. 9 Democratic primary. The campaign will be run by the state-level political action committee Invest in America’s Future.

McKee has repeatedly linked rising utility bills to clean energy. His budget proposal this spring included measures that would have delayed the state’s transition to 100% renewable energy by nearly two decades and slashed energy-efficiency spending by more than 20%. State lawmakers in June blocked these efforts, but a few weeks later McKee vetoed legislation that would have required owners of large buildings to track and report their energy use.

“We are on a mission to ensure that there are consequences for politicians in both parties who scapegoat renewable energy for their own failures,” said Invest in America’s Future spokesperson Chris Coffey. ​“McKee might believe that blaming clean energy is a convenient way to deflect responsibility for Rhode Island’s affordability crisis, but by the time primary day comes around, we will ensure that every single Rhode Islander knows exactly where the buck stops.”

McKee’s chances at keeping his seat were already shaky, with a recent poll putting him 38 percentage points behind his primary challenger, former CVS executive Helena Foulkes. His lack of support has largely been attributed to the hasty closure in 2023 of the Washington Bridge, a major span in the tiny state, and the long delay before rebuilding began.

Invest in Tomorrow, however, wants its involvement to send a message: Oppose clean energy and we will do everything we can to oppose you.

Invest in Tomorrow was founded after the Trump administration — with the help of congressional Republicans — unraveled clean-energy incentives created by the Inflation Reduction Act. Its goal is to threaten clean energy opponents with the kind of electoral consequences long wielded by the gun lobby and oil interests.

The group’s first three targets were all congressional Republicans: Rep. Chip Roy, who was running for state attorney general in Texas; Rep. Andy Ogles, who was seeking reelection in Tennessee; and Rep. Ralph Norman, whom ITC targeted in his bid for South Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial nomination in June and then again in the recent race for the late Sen. Lindsey Graham’s seat. All three lost their races.

The ads ITC pays for generally do not reflect the group’s focus on climate and clean energy issues. Instead, it deploys messages it thinks will be most effective against an individual candidate. Ads opposing Roy painted him as insufficiently loyal to President Donald Trump, for example. The spots running against McKee accuse him of mismanaging the Washington Bridge closure and of doing financial favors for his donors.

McKee is not the only Democratic governor to consider tempering climate commitments in the face of high prices and anxious constituents. Most prominently, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has rolled back the state’s once-ambitious emissions-reduction goals.

McKee, however, has been perhaps the most pugnacious on the topic. He declared in July that anyone who argues against his proposals wants residents to have higher bills and is ​“advocating for their own personal self-interests.”

“If you wanted to take an action to show the Democratic governors that they need to get in line on the issue of climate, McKee is a good choice,” said Christian Roselund, a leader with nonprofit advocacy group Climate Action Rhode Island. ​“I’ve been trying to find a Democratic governor with a worse record on the climate than Dan McKee, and I’m not sure there is one.”

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