President-elect Donald Trump announced that Chris Wright, the CEO and founder of Denver, Colorado-based Liberty Energy, will lead the Department of Energy (DOE) in the new administration.
“I am thrilled to announce that Chris Wright will be joining my Administration as both United States Secretary of Energy, and Member of the newly formed Council of National Energy,” Trump wrote in a statement released Nov. 16. The newly-elected president wrote that Wright “has been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in Energy.”
Wright, who founded oilfield services company Liberty Energy in 2011 and also serves as executive chairman of Liberty Resources, a company focused on the Bakken shale play in North Dakota, “has worked in Nuclear, Solar, Geothermal, and Oil and Gas,” Trump’s statement read. “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.”
Wright in a post to social media platform X wrote: “I am honored and grateful for the opportunity from
@realDonaldTrump to serve our country as U.S. Secretary of Energy. My dedication to bettering human lives remains steadfast, with a focus on making American energy more affordable, reliable, and secure. Energy is the lifeblood that makes everything in life possible. Energy matters. I am looking forward to getting to work.”
Harold Hamm, a billionaire Trump ally and donor and longtime oil and gas executive, had recently publicly stated that Wright was his top choice to lead the DOE. Hamm, executive chairman of Oklahoma-based Continental Resources, a major shale oil company, was a key adviser on energy issues during Trump’s first term as president.
Hamm helped organize an event at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in April where Trump reportedly asked industry leaders and lobbyists to donate $1 billion to his presidential campaign. The money would come with an expectation that Trump would curtail environmental regulations if re-elected.
DOE Oversight
The DOE has oversight over several federal government agencies, including the Loan Programs Office, which runs grant and loan programs to advance energy technologies, including electric vehicles (EVs) and renewable energy. The DOE also oversees the U.S. nuclear waste disposal, the nuclear weapons complex, and 17 national labs. Trump during his first term asked Congress for deep cuts in funding to several federal programs, including the DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Trump on Saturday also said that Wright, in addition to his role as energy secretary, would serve on a newly formed Council of National Energy that would be led by Doug Burgum, the president-elect’s nominee for Interior Secretary. Trump has said the group would focus on cutting regulations and increasing investments to ramp up oil and gas production. The U.S. has led the world in oil and gas production each year since 2018, and has reached record levels of output during the Biden administration, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Trump has said the Energy Council would include all agencies and departments involved in the production, regulation, and transportation of “ALL forms of American Energy.”
Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), an industry trade group representing electric utilities, on Saturday said EEI members want the incoming Trump administration to preserve tax credits for clean energy and EV sales that are part of the 2022-enacted Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Pizarro in an interview with Reuters said his group’s members have talked with Trump’s transition team, and Republicans in Congress, about how the IRA’s provisions are good for consumers and businesses.
Pizarro, speaking with Reuters at the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, said retaining IRA tax credits for energy storage, transmission, nuclear power, hydrogen, and EVs are critical for continued growth in the energy sector. “One of our big priorities as an industry is going to be to articulate the benefits of the IRA,” Pizarro told Reuters. Major EV and battery manufacturers in recent days have urged the president-elect not to end tax credits for EVs, warning it would have a negative impact on jobs in states such as Ohio, Kentucky, Georgia, and Michigan, all won by Trump in the recent election.
Leading Oil and Gas Exec
Wright, well-known in the U.S. oil and gas community and a previous speaker at LDC Gas Forums events—a group that is part of Access Intelligence, the parent of POWER—has a degree in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He also completed graduate work in electrical engineering at University of California-Berkeley and MIT. He will need to be confirmed for the position by the U.S. Senate, although Trump has floated the idea of allowing recess appointments to his Cabinet and other positions to avoid Senate action. The U.S. Constitution’s recess appointments power allows a president to make a temporary appointment to a position that would normally require Senate confirmation while the Senate is in recess. Those recess appointments would last until the end of the upcoming session of Congress, which in this case would be 2026.
Wright if confirmed would replace Jennifer Granholm as head of the DOE. Granholm, a former governor of Michigan, was chosen as Energy Secretary by President Biden in 2021. Granholm has been a proponent of clean energy. In a September 2024 interview with TIME magazine, Granholm said since she took office in 2021, the DOE has hired about 1,000 new workers and created new leadership roles. Granholm said the changes helped the DOE implement 60 new programs, and support funding for thousands of energy-related projects.
Wright runs a foundation that has dispelled the conventional wisdom on human-caused climate change and promotes increased production of fossil fuels as a solution to many of the world’s problems. According to the Denver Business Journal, campaign contribution records from the Federal Elections Commission show that Wright and his wife, Liz Wright, gave $599,681 since Jan. 1 of last year to federal political action committees associated with Republican causes, the Republican National Committee and the Trump 47 Committee. FEC records show that $457,980 worth of contributions, or $228,990 in two identical contributions by each of the Wrights, were made in July and August of this year to the Trump 47 Committee Inc.
The Houston, Texas-based Energy Workforce & Technology Council (EWTC) in an emailed statement to POWER said it supported Wright’s nomination. “Chris Wright is a visionary leader who has consistently advocated for advancing American energy,” said Tim Tarpley, Energy Workforce president. “His groundbreaking Bettering Human Lives report brought to light the moral case for expanding American energy production to grow our economy and improve living standards of those across the country. As a dedicated member of the Energy Workforce & Technology Council, Chris has an unparalleled understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing the energy sector. There is no doubt that his expertise and leadership will make him an outstanding Secretary of Energy. EWTC looks forward to partnering with him to unleashing the full potential of American energy.”
Republican Sen. John Barrasso, who is expected to become chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, called Wright “an energy innovator who laid the foundation for America’s fracking boom … our country is desperate for a secretary [of energy] who understands how important American energy is to our economy and our national security. Wright will help ensure America remains committed to an all-of-the-above energy policy that puts American families first.”
Christopher Barnard, president of the American Conservation Coalition, also was among those applauding the choice of Wright. “From nuclear to solar to geothermal to oil & gas, Chris Wright has been a pioneer of American energy,” Barnard wrote on X. “Chris Wright + Doug Burgum is literally the dream team.”
Environmentalists were quick to condemn Wright’s nomination. Tiernan Sittenfeld, head of government affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, in a statement said, “It is not surprising, but still appalling, that Trump’s pick for Secretary of Energy is a climate-denying Big Oil executive. With the nomination of Chris Wright, Trump is following through on the $1 billion offer he made to Big Oil at a dinner this spring.”
Jackie Wong, senior vice president for climate and energy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, another environmental group, in a statement called Wright “a champion of dirty fossil fuels” and said his nomination to lead the DOE was “a disastrous mistake.”
“The Energy Department should be doing all it can to develop and expand the energy sources of the 21st century, not trying to promote the dirty fuels of the last century,” Wong said. “Given the devastating impacts of climate-fueled disasters, DOE’s core mission of researching and promoting cleaner energy solutions is more important now than ever.”
‘No Climate Crisis’
Wright has no previous political experience. He is expected to support Trump’s opposition to global cooperation on fighting climate change. Wright has called climate change activists alarmist; he also said efforts by Democrats to combat global warming were akin to Soviet-style communism.
“There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile last year. Wright has said increased fossil fuel production would lower energy costs and help the overall economy, and has written that more output of fossil fuels would help lift people out of poverty.
Wright in 2019 drank the fluid used in hydraulic fracturing, the drilling process known as fracking, to prove the fluid is not dangerous. John Hickenlooper, now a Democratic senator from Colorado, also drank fracking fluid in 2013, when he was Colorado’s governor.
One form of renewable energy—geothermal—could be helped by Wright’s presence. Liberty Energy is an investor in Fervo Energy, one of the leading enhanced geothermal startups, and oil and gas companies are investing in geothermal because it uses similar technology to oil and gas extraction.
“I cannot imagine a nominee with more technical and commercial understanding of EGS [enhanced geothermal systems] and the need to deploy geothermal for clean, firm power. Congrats, @ChrisAWright, looking forward to working with your team,” Ben Serrurier, the head of government affairs and policy at Fervo, wrote on X.
Mitigating Drilling Impacts
Liberty Energy, which operates in several major U.S. shale plays, is considered a leader in mitigating the impacts of fracking in oil and gas extraction. The company introduced noise-dampening, foam-layered compartments known as Quiet Fleet several years ago to lessen the noise of drilling operations. Liberty also has made a business out of powering fracking fleets with lower-emissions fuels, including hydrogen.
The company over the past couple of years has successfully used electricity-powered fracking fleets that it designed. The so-called “digifrac” electric units are replacing fracking engines powered by diesel fuel or natural gas. The electric versions help reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions generated at a fracking site.
The company last year acquired Houston, Texas-based Siren Energy for $78 million. The acquisition of Siren and that company’s bulk fuel delivery business is part of a Liberty division called Liberty Power Innovations, which delivers compressed natural gas, hydrogen fuel, and renewable natural gas to work sites, including drilling operations.
—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).
