Fracking CEO Chris Wright pledges to implement a diversified approach to lowering fuel and electricity costs in a friendly Senate nomination hearing.
Energy Secretary nominee Chris Wright told key senators that if confirmed, he’d embrace an “all-of-the-above” approach to energy development, sustain funding for research programs, slash permitting timelines, encourage natural gas exports, and accelerate electric grid expansion.
During his nearly three-hour Jan. 15 nomination hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, President-elect Donald Trump’s selection to lead the Department of Energy (DOE) said that upon assuming office, he would “immediately” freeze more than $25 billion in loans being processed by the DOE’s Loan Program Office (LPO) in the wake of recent Inspector General (IG) disclosures.
Wright, the MIT-educated CEO of Colorado-based Liberty Energy, among the nation’s largest fracking contractors, was less resolute when asked how he’d respond as DOE chief to anticipated efforts by the Trump administration to “claw back” funding in the annual budgets and spending programs authorized over multiple years by Congress.
President-elect Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director nominee Russell Vought, who led OMB during Trump’s first term, supports executive “impoundment” of funds passed by Congress. Vought’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee began at 1 p.m. on Jan. 15.
“If the OMB director was to try to direct your department not to fund a program or an activity that Congress had expressly appropriated funding for, would you follow the law?” asked Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.).
“My mission, the only way I roll, would be to follow the laws and statutes of the United States of America,” Wright said.
Democrats questioned if Wright would safeguard allocations authorized by 2021’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and safeguard the Biden administration’s signature “green energy” bills in the 2022 CHIPS & Science Act and Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) from any executive, administrative, or legislative efforts to unplug the funding streams.
The IRA rolls out 10 years of sustained tax credits, low-interest loans, and grant programs that, by some estimates including one by the University of Pennsylvania, could top $1 trillion to subsidize investment in renewable energy generation, supply chains, job creation, advanced manufacturing, and electric grid expansion.
Asked how he would “protect clean energy provisions in the IRA,” Wright replied, “I would follow the statutes and laws of the United States.”
Despite those vanilla vagaries and six pauses to silence climate activists, Wright’s interview with senators was friendly, with the Denver native garnering bipartisan plaudits as an energy renaissance man of sorts.
Wright was praised as a “breath of fresh air,” common sense businessman who is firmly anchored in fossil fuel development while also being a scientist and engineer who during the hearing repeatedly said climate change is real but holds that climate alarmism, as encoded into policy by the Biden administration, hampers the effectiveness of addressing the risks.
In introducing Wright to the panel, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.) said he and the nominee “disagree on a lot of things” and recalled how an “almost legendary” heated discussion between them disrupted at an Easter dinner a decade ago.
“Some people would be surprised I’m introducing him here, and yet, he’s a scientist who has invested his life around energy,” Hickenlooper said.
“He’s, indeed, an unrestrained enthusiast for fossil fuels in almost every regard, but he studied nuclear. His first years working were in solar. He has experience in wind. He is a practitioner and a key innovator around geothermal,” the senator continued. “He is a scientist who is open to discussion, and he is, again, a scientist who is a successful entrepreneur and has that ability to assess what is possible and what isn’t.”
Newly-seated Chair Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said Liberty Energy’s Bettering Human Lives report offers “a pretty clear-headed perspective to the climate change dialog, which, I think, has been sorely missing,” and “speaks volumes about [Wright’s] qualifications and about the expertise and know-how that you bring to the job.”
“You understand the energy sector and the many challenges that it faces, including and especially those from the government,” Lee said.
Lee noted a December interim inspector general report that “raised several pretty serious concerns” regarding potential conflicts of interest within DOE’s Loan Program Office with some contractors allegedly holding “troubling dual roles” as advisors and recipients.
Republicans have chafed at DOE’s Loan Program Office spending since the office was established in 2005. Boosted by $37 billion in IRA loan authorizations for clean energy projects, about $25 billion remains “unfinalized” and is being eyed for clawbacks or defunding.
“If you’re confirmed, will you commit to following the Inspector General’s recommendation and suspend the issuance of new loans until the loan program office’s compliance with conflicts of interest regulations and contractual obligations is guaranteed?” Lee asked.
“I will immediately,” Wright responded.
Lee said Wright is ideally suited to “bring balance back” in refocusing DOE “on what ought to be its core mission, ensuring energy security, driving innovation, and lowering costs for American families” at a critical juncture for the nation’s economy and security.
“American energy demand is growing, growing, growing because of our growth; growing because of the ways in which we use energy, with data centers and artificial intelligence making a dent and about to make a much bigger dent,” Lee said. “We need to energize our economy. It sounds like you grasp that fully and are ready to take that challenge on.”
Wright—an investor in Fervo Energy, a Texas “green energy” company that uses fracking technologies to develop geothermal resources—while celebrating his 60th birthday on Jan. 15 said he would be a steady advocate and applicator of Trump’s energy policies.
“We share a passion for energy, and the reason I sit in front of you today is because President-elect Trump shares a passion for energy and an instinctual understanding that energy is not a sector of the economy—it’s the sector of the economy that enables everything else we do,” he said.
Wright said he’d administer an energy policy that safeguards “American quality of life, American economic strength, our geopolitical power, and what the possibilities are for the future, how we can make our children and grandchildren’s lives so much better than ours.”
Sen. Jim Justice (R-W.V.), the former governor of West Virginia in his first hearing succeeding the retired Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.V.), said the next DOE chief must “solve the riddle” of making “all of the above” energy accessible and affordable to homes, businesses, and industry where they are and when they need it.
“Are you in a position of thinking about, of embracing, all energy forms? Of solving the whole riddle?” Justice asked.
Wright said in response, “We want energy from all sources.”
“We can add energy from all sources to our pile of affordable, reliable, secure American energy,” he said.