Please read this article from the Washington Free Beacon.
President Joe Biden’s Energy Department funneled millions of dollars to a green energy company in the months after the company partnered with a Chinese state-owned entity that it acknowledges could face business-crippling sanctions.
Carbon capture company LanzaTech, federal spending disclosures show, has received more than $10 million in grant payments from the Biden administration since April 2021, when the company announced a partnership with Sinopec Capital—the clean energy investment arm of the Sinopec Group, a Chinese state-owned oil conglomerate also known as the China Petrochemical Corporation—to “debut an international market of new energy and new materials.” LanzaTech has acknowledged in SEC disclosures that its association with Sinopec, which China has used to purchase oil from U.S.-sanctioned nations such as Russia and Iran, could jeopardize its bottom line. The company’s financial interactions with Sinopec and other Beijing-run entities, LanzaTech wrote in a November filing, could bring “complications” and “restrictions” should the United States or other nations implement “sanctions on certain Chinese individuals.” That filing also notes “that the Chinese government may intervene or influence our operations at any time” and that LanzaTech may be unable to “protect our interests” in Chinese joint ventures “by nominating a non-Chinese director to the board of directors of any such joint venture.” Sinopec Capital managing director Bo Ren, who worked for CITIC’s brokerage arm prior to joining Sinopec and who graduated from a Chinese university that sits on a U.S. trade blacklist for stealing American trade secrets, is a LanzaTech board member.
Biden has placed green energy at the center of his administration’s priorities, with the Democrat working to invest billions of dollars in “America’s clean energy economy” to create “good-paying jobs” in the United States. However, China’s dominance of the clean energy supply chain challenges that priority. In addition to LanzaTech, Biden’s Energy Department has touted a $200 million grant to lithium battery company Microvast Holdings, which the department said would “supercharge the private sector to ensure our clean energy future is America-made.” Microvast operates primarily out of China and was recently added to a Securities and Exchange Commission watchlist of Chinese companies that have failed to comply with American auditing requirements, the Washington Free Beacon reported Tuesday.
LanzaTech’s partnership with Sinopec was not the first time the company aligned itself with a Beijing-run entity. In June 2018, LanzaTech entered into a joint venture with Chinese state-owned steel giant Shougang Group to build an ethanol plant in China’s Hubei province, one of the company’s three plants in the communist nation. LanzaTech has also raised millions from CITIC Capital, a subsidiary of China’s largest state-run conglomerate. Still, the company’s relationships with Beijing did not stop the Biden administration from sending LanzaTech millions of dollars for green energy projects such as “low-cost sustainable aviation fuel.”
For Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton, Biden’s support for companies such as LanzaTech shows that the Democrat’s “green energy agenda is stamped with the words ‘made in China.'”
“Instead of handing millions of taxpayer dollars to a Chinese-backed company, the president should be encouraging American energy production and American energy independence,” Cotton told the Free Beacon.
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