(Bloomberg) — Standing shoulder to shoulder with his employees, Chris Wright, chief executive officer of oilfield services company Liberty Energy Inc., held up his glass in a toast.
“To your health and the longer lives and healthier lives of billions of people around the world from oil and gas,” Wright said. Then he gulped down a shot of fracking fluid.
By quaffing the chemical cocktail of water, bleach, soap and other substances in a 2019 Facebook video, Wright, Donald Trump’s nominee for energy secretary, sought to refute fracking opponents who argued it would poison aquifers. Five years later, the stunt suggests how he might carry out US energy policy: with a flair for showmanship and an appetite for confrontation.
In a slew of TV interviews and speeches, Wright has proclaimed the moral virtues of fossil fuels and championed them as a way to lift people out of poverty. A few years ago, he picked a public fight with The North Face Inc. after the outwear maker declined to make a co-branded jacket with a Liberty competitor because of its oil-industry links. (Wright commissioned billboards that said: “That North Face puffer looks great on you. And it was made from fossil fuels.”) He has called greenhouse-gas reduction goals “perverse,” questioned the environmental benefits of electric vehicles and attacked subsidies for wind and solar projects.
His outspokenness is poised to set him apart from Trump’s previous energy secretaries, the comparatively buttoned-up Rick Perry and Dan Brouillette. But Wright, an industry insider who would be taking on his first political role, can be nuanced. A self-professed “nerdy guy,” he frequently gives lectures about the global energy system, using data-heavy charts to illustrate his points. Rather than deny climate change outright, he characterizes it as a “modest phenomenon.”
“Wright is literally an evangelist for better human living through the production of more hydrocarbons,” said Jim Lucier, managing director at Capital Alpha Partners, a research group in Washington.
His appointment is indicative of Trump’s hard pivot toward fossil fuels after years of Biden administration policies that benefited renewables. There’s actually little Wright can do to boost drilling from a perch atop the Energy Department, which doesn’t have oversight of federal oil and natural gas leases. But he could revamp the agency’s clean-energy loan program to fund projects favored by Republicans, a potential boon for gas and nuclear plants. He could also speed the approval of gas exports, cementing America’s status as a major supplier of the fuel to Europe and Asia.
He would also almost certainly be instrumental in fulfilling Trump’s promises to help the coal industry, build more power plants, expand electrical grids and cut the overall price of energy by half. And he'll serve on Trump's newly created National Energy Council along side North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, Trump's nominee for Interior Secretary. Wright didn’t respond to a request for comment.
If confirmed by the Senate, Wright would lead a department with about 16,000 employees, more than double the size of his own company's 5,500-person workforce. In addition to promoting advancements in energy technology, the agency is responsible for ensuring the safety of the US arsenal of nuclear weapons.
The Energy Department’s $400 billion green bank could prove to be a tantalizing tool for Wright.
Though it was once marked for death under the first Trump administration, Wright could use the loan program to finance projects such as hydrogen production, carbon capture and storage, and small modular reactors. Wright, who has spoken about the benefits of nuclear power, serves on the board of Oklo Inc., an SMR developer chaired by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and his company is an investor in geothermal energy and sodium-ion battery technology.
The head of Occidental Petroleum Corp., an oil producer that’s building the world’s largest plant to pull carbon dioxide directly from the air, said she’s enthusiastic about Wright’s nomination and deemed Trump’s reelection a boon for carbon capture and the oil and gas industry. Occidental is set to receive as much as $650 million from the Energy Department for carbon capture.
“I don’t think that President Trump could have picked anyone better,” Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub said in an interview at a shale conference last month. “We need someone who understands the importance of our energy independence, and oil and gas development here in the US.”
But emerging clean technologies championed by the Biden administration — including those that rival oil and gas, like certain types of batteries — could lose a critical funding source.
“We think the Energy Department has an extremely important role to play both in terms of its innovation programs, the research and development and the deployment we’ve seen grow under Biden,” said Jackie Wong, a senior vice president at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We’d really like to see an energy secretary lean into this and build on it — not take it in the opposite direction.”
Like Trump’s first energy secretary, Perry, Wright is a vocal proponent of liquefied natural gas terminals. US LNG developers need permits from the Energy Department to export gas. While the Biden administration put new authorizations on hold to review the projects’ climate impact, Trump’s transition team is already crafting an executive order to lift the moratorium.
Wright was scheduled to meet Wednesday with with Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican who is set to chair the powerful energy committee, and Senator John Hoeven, a North Dakota Republican, who is also on the committee, according to a transition team official.
Wright, 59, was born in New Jersey and raised in Colorado, the youngest of four children born within four years to a father who worked in the investment industry and a mother who managed the home. After earning an engineering degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he founded a company called Pinnacle Technologies in 1992.
Pinnacle developed a mapping software that was “instrumental in the development” of oil- and gas-rich shale formations previously thought to be inaccessible, said Paul Vitek, who was chief financial officer at Liberty Resources LLC, a company Wright started to help take advantage of the technology he created. Wright took a subsequent company, now known as Liberty Energy, public in 2018 as the shale boom propelled US oil output to record highs.
Wright acknowledges the Earth is warming, but he believes the effects can be managed through human ingenuity — a position that puts him at odds with the scientific consensus that the world faces catastrophic impacts if emissions aren’t slashed. He credits fossil fuels with providing affordable energy that's helped alleviate poverty around the globe. Earlier this year, Wright founded a nonprofit to assist people in developing nations cook with gas stoves instead of dung or wood. He says the costs of curbing fossil-fuel use would be enormous.
“If instead of raising CO2 concentration by 50% we cut it by 50%, that would be a crisis,” he said, adding that plants need carbon dioxide to grow. He also says Earth is getting “meaningfully greener,” citing research into leaf size. And Wright sees no long-term increase in damage from natural disasters, though government data suggests otherwise.
One thing Wright probably can’t do is deliver on Trump’s vow to “frack, frack, frack.” Oil prices, set by the global market, have slid in recent months on concern that demand will fall short of supply. Concern about a glut, along with pressure to restrain spending and return cash to shareholders, is likely to cause US producers to slow drilling activity.
Wright has slammed subsidies for wind and solar power, saying at the Enercom Denver conference earlier this year that “they’ve made electricity more expensive and the grid less reliable.” But killing the tax breaks outright would require an act of Congress. He’s argued that the energy-intensive process to manufacture electric vehicles means “you have to drive a Tesla 80,000 miles to get its greenhouse gas emissions down to the level of an internal combustion engine.”
Still, Wright could help fulfill Trump’s promise to refill the nation’s emergency cache of oil following the Biden administration’s drawdown in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While adding barrels to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve wouldn’t change producers’ long-term plans, it could provide a modest lift for oil prices in the short term.
Jerry Simmons, president of the Domestic Energy Producers Alliance, said to have someone like Wright “in a cabinet position is just huge.” The industry group was founded by oil billionaire and Trump adviser Harold Hamm, who advocated for Wright to be tapped for Energy Secretary.
Dan Eberhart, chief executive officer of oilfield services company Canary LLC, said Wright has a deep understanding of the industry.
"We can't address climate change or any of the challenges facing us from a place of weakness,” Eberhart said. “Under Wright, the Energy Department will champion abundant and affordable energy."
(Updates with details on Wright meeting with senators.)
