Dive Brief:
- President-elect Donald Trump’s selections of North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, R, to lead the Department of Interior and Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright to lead the Department of Energy could forecast an administration where all types of generation are used to meet Trump’s stated goal of energy dominance, experts say.
- Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell, and Harry Godfrey, who leads Advanced Energy United’s federal investment and manufacturing working group, both pointed to Wright’s status as a board member at small modular reactor company Oklo and an investor in geothermal developer Fervo Energy as an indicator that Wright might not curtail federal support for renewable energy.
- When it comes to Burgum, Maisano said, “North Dakota is an all of the above state – it's got lots of solar, it's got lots of wind, it has [carbon capture and storage], it has pipelines, it has energy storage, it has everything. And Burgum has been the driver of a lot of that through state policy.”
Dive Insight:
After Trump announced his choice of Wright for Secretary of Energy on Nov. 16, climate groups expressed opposition to the CEO, who said in a video posted to LinkedIn last year that “there is no climate crisis” and “there is no such thing as clean energy or dirty energy.”
“Not since Donald Trump's most recent cabinet pick has a nominee ever been so utterly unqualified for the job,” Sierra Club Executive Director Ben Jealous said in a statement. “Chris Wright is a climate denier who has profited off of polluting our communities and endangering our health and future.”
Maisano said he found environmentalists’ initial assessment of Wright and Burgum to be “misplaced,” and that “both of them have a very aggressive approach towards renewables … they [just] don't use the same language that environmental activists do when it comes to the energy transition, when it comes to climate change.”
“I'm convinced that both of them will be good, they'll be rational,” he said. Maisano also noted that he thinks the Republican-controlled Congress will retain most aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed without Republican support and has been criticized by Trump.
“Can it be tweaked? Yes. Is it going to be thrown out completely? No,” he said. “I think that’s the common theme that you're hearing from almost everybody, besides a handful of conservative anti-climate activists and a handful of members of Congress and the Freedom Caucus — and not even the full Freedom Caucus, but some of the budget hawks that want to just slash a lot of the spending.”
In a Truth Social post announcing his pick, Trump said that Wright “has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, and Oil and Gas,” and “most significantly” 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 had announced Burgum’s nomination the day prior, and said that Burgum would also be picked to serve as chairman of the “newly formed, and very important, National Energy Council, which will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American Energy.”
“We will ‘DRILL BABY DRILL, [and] expand ALL forms of Energy production to grow our Economy,” Trump wrote.
Godfrey said that Advanced Energy United is not going to “prejudge” either candidate based on background alone. Instead, he said, the group will be watching to see if the second Trump administration prioritizes continued work to “build a more resilient, connected and functional grid across the United States.”
They are also waiting to see how that administration approaches transmission buildout, and how the incoming Energy Secretary uses “tools of certain industrial policy to continue advancing advanced energy work through the Department of Energy.”
“That is, what do they do with [the Loan Programs Office]?” he said. “We know in 2025 that the LPO will continue to have significant lending authority.”
During the first Trump administration, the LPO – which was expanded significantly by the IRA’s passage in 2021 2022 and holds $400 billion in loan authority – “did not close a single loan guarantee,” according to Hogan Lovells attorney Mary Anne Sullivan.
The Trump administration’s use of the LPO “is in stark comparison to the dozens and dozens of loans and conditional loans that LPO has utilized in the last four years,” Godfrey said.
“But who do you put at LPO and how much do you utilize it?” he said. “Our hope would be the vision that exists there, which, yes, the current administration has sort of put in place. But there's this throughline in policymaking since 2016, 2017, that is the revival of industrial policy. It is the decline of neoliberalism. It's ‘Let’s make more stuff in America. Let's prioritize industrial development, let’s rebuild American manufacturing.’”
Trump’s rhetoric around trade and competition with China helped prompt that “sea change,” Godfrey said.
“There's a continuity here where, conceivably, the incoming administration could say – the tools that we have here, and the policy that DOE is empowered to put in place, fit with a larger mindset about how we approach the world and we approach energy dominance,” he said.
