President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday named Chris Wright, the CEO of Denver-based fracking company Liberty Energy, as his pick to be the next secretary of the Department of Energy.
Wright will also serve as a member on the newly formed Council of National Energy, which Trump said will consist of all agencies involved in the “permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation” of energy. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum – Trump’s pick for secretary of the Department of the Interior – will be the chairman.
“Chris has been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in Energy. 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 wrote in a statement Saturday.
In addition to his company’s work on fracking oil and natural gas, Wright also sits on the board of a modular nuclear reactor company and has talked about the potential of nuclear energy. Developing nuclear energy has become a big focus of the Biden administration’s Energy Department. The department also houses the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency that maintains the nuclear stockpile.
Harold Hamm, the Oklahoma-based fracking billionaire who has had Trump’s ear on energy issues during the campaign, told trade publication Hart Energy on Monday that Wright was his top choice for the post, calling him a “really, really sharp individual.”
Wright has acknowledged the link between burning fossil fuels and climate change but has expressed doubt that climate change is linked to worsening extreme weather. He has also been a staunch supporter of fossil fuels in public interviews, saying they are necessary to lift the developing world out of poverty.
“The world runs on oil and gas, and we need that,” Wright told CNBC in a 2023 interview, saying that calls to transition off fossil fuels in a decade was an “absurd time frame.”
In 2021, the International Energy Agency said that for the world to keep the worst impacts of global warming at bay, no new fossil fuel developments should be approved. Many countries, including the US under President Joe Biden, have approved new projects since then.
“Standing in the way of today’s energy system before we’ve built a new energy system, there’s just no upside in that,” Wright told CNBC. “I don’t think you’ll see meaningful change in our hydrocarbon system in the next three decades.”