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Trump Chooses Oil Fracking Boss Wright as Energy Secretary
(Bloomberg) -- President-elect Donald Trump nominated Chris Wright, who runs a Colorado-based oil and natural gas fracking services company, to lead the Energy Department.
Wright, the chief executive officer of Liberty Energy Inc., has no previous Washington experience. He’s made a name for himself as a vocal proponent of oil and gas, saying fossil fuels are crucial for spreading prosperity and lifting people from poverty. The threat of global warming, he has said, is exaggerated.
“Chris has been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in Energy,” Trump said in a statement Saturday. “He has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, and Oil and Gas. Most significantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Energy Independence, and transformed the Global Energy Markets and Geopolitics.”
Trump said Wright, if confirmed, would also sit on the newly formed Council of National Energy that will be chaired by Doug Burgum, Trump’s nominee to lead the Interior Department.
The Energy Department has a disparate mission that includes helping to maintain the nation’s nuclear warheads, studying supercomputers and maintaining the US’s several hundred million-barrel stockpile of crude oil.
It also plays a key role in approving projects to export liquefied natural gas, something that was paused during Biden’s administration. Trump has vowed to undo the pause.
While the department has little authority over oil and gas development, Wright will play a leading role in helping Trump carry out his energy priorities.
Trump’s selection of Wright, whose company is among the largest providers of fracking services globally, is a show of support for the hot-button oil and gas extraction method that Trump frequently touted during the campaign to attack his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.
Harris said she’d consider banning the technique during her 2020 primary run and reversed course in her 2024 campaign.
‘No Climate Crisis’
Wright’s company published a 180-page paper this year that concluded climate change “is far from the world’s greatest threat to human life,” and that “hydrocarbons are essential to improving the wealth, health, and life opportunities for the less energized.”
“There is no climate crisis. And we are not in the midst of an energy transition either,” Wright said in a video posted on his LinkedIn page. “Humans, and all complex life on earth, is simply impossible without carbon dioxide — hence the term carbon pollution is outrageous.”
Wright holds engineering degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California at Berkeley. He describes himself on his Denver-based company’s website as a “tech nerd turned entrepreneur and a dedicated humanitarian.”
While Wright has warned that subsidies for wind and solar drive up power prices and increase grid instability, he does support alternative energy. He serves on the board of small modular reactor developer Oklo Inc., and his company is an investor in geothermal energy and sodium-ion battery technology.
“I’m not here to protect market share for oil gas,” he said during a 2022 interview with Bloomberg Television. “We should do credible things, mostly driven by market forces. But shoveling subsidies at wind and solar, which are 3% of global energy, that’s not meaningfully going to change greenhouse gas emissions. But it is going to drive electricity prices up.”
Wright is also on the board EMX Royalty Corp., a global mining royalties firm, according to his company bio.
Trump named Wright with backing from Continental Resources Chairman Harold Hamm, a Trump energy adviser and donor. Hamm said in an interview with the Houston-based trade publication Hart Energy that Wright was his choice for the job.
If confirmed by Congress, Wright would play a leading role in Trump carrying out his campaign pledge to declare a national emergency on energy. Trump has cast such a declaration as helping increase domestic energy production — including for electricity — which he says is needed to help meet booming power needs for artificial intelligence.
Under the first Trump administration, the Energy Department played a critical role in the president-elect’s efforts to revive US coal power, an initiative he’s hinted he may attempt again.
Wright would also oversee Trump’s promise to refill the nation’s emergency cache of crude oil. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which has a capacity of more than 700 million barrels, reached lows not seen since the 1980s following the Biden administration’s unprecedented drawdown of a record 180 million barrels in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Trump’s first energy secretary, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, called for eliminating the agency entirely during a run for president in the 2012 cycle. He later apologized and vowed to defend the agency “after being briefed on so many of the vital functions” it plays.
--With assistance from David Wethe.
(Adds Wright’s past positions on climate change, energy needs.)