President-elect Donald Trump introduced that Chris Wright, the CEO and founding father of Denver, Colorado-based Liberty Power, will lead the Division of Power within the new administration.
“I’m thrilled to announce that Chris Wright shall be becoming a member of my Administration as each United States Secretary of Power, and Member of the newly fashioned Council of Nationwide Power,” Trump wrote in a press release launched Nov. 16. The newly-elected president wrote that Wright “has been a number one technologist and entrepreneur in Power.”
Wright, who based Liberty Power in 2011 and likewise serves as government chairman of Liberty Sources, an organization targeted on the Bakken shale play in North Dakota, “has labored in Nuclear, Photo voltaic, Geothermal, and Oil and Gasoline,” Trump’s assertion learn. “Most importantly, Chris was one of many pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American Power Independence, and reworked the International Power Markets and Geopolitics.”
The DOE has oversight over a number of federal authorities businesses, together with the Mortgage Applications Workplace, which runs grant and mortgage packages to advance vitality applied sciences, together with electrical automobiles and renewable vitality. The DOE additionally oversees the U.S. nuclear waste disposal, the nuclear weapons advanced, and 17 nationwide labs.
Main Oil and Gasoline Exec
Wright, well-known within the U.S. oil and gasoline group, has a level in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Know-how (MIT). He additionally accomplished graduate work in electrical engineering at College of California-Berkeley and MIT. Liberty Power is an oilfield providers agency. He’ll have to be confirmed for the place by the U.S. Senate, though Trump has floated the thought of permitting recess appointments to his Cupboard and different positions to keep away from Senate motion. The U.S. Structure’s recess appointments energy permits a president to make a short lived appointment to a place that might usually require Senate affirmation whereas the Senate is in recess. These recess appointments would final till the top of the upcoming session of Congress, which on this case can be 2026.
Wright would exchange Jennifer Granholm as head of the DOE. Granholm, a former governor of Michigan, was chosen as Power Secretary by President Biden in 2021. Granholm has been a proponent of unpolluted vitality. In a September 2024 interview with TIME journal, Granholm mentioned since she took workplace in 2021, the DOE has employed about 1,000 new employees and created new management roles. Granholm mentioned the modifications helped the DOE implement 60 new packages, and assist funding for hundreds of energy-related tasks.
‘No Local weather Disaster’
Wright has no earlier political expertise. He’s anticipated to assist Trump’s opposition to world cooperation on preventing local weather change. Wright has referred to as local weather change activists alarmist; he additionally mentioned efforts by Democrats to fight world warming had been akin to Soviet-style communism.
“There isn’t a local weather disaster, and we’re not within the midst of an vitality transition, both,” Wright mentioned in a video posted to his LinkedIn profile final 12 months. Wright has mentioned elevated fossil gasoline manufacturing would decrease vitality prices and assist the general economic system, and has written that extra output of fossil fuels would assist elevate folks out of poverty.
Wright in 2019 drank the fluid utilized in hydraulic fracturing, the drilling course of often called fracking, to show the fluid shouldn’t be harmful. John Hickenlooper, now a Democratic senator from Colorado, additionally drank fracking fluid in 2013, when he was Colorado’s governor.
Mitigating Drilling Impacts
Liberty Power, which operates in a number of main U.S. shale performs, is taken into account a pacesetter in mitigating the impacts of fracking in oil and gasoline extraction. The corporate launched noise-dampening, foam-layered compartments often called Quiet Fleet a number of years in the past to reduce the noise of drilling operations. Liberty additionally has made a enterprise out of powering fracking fleets with lower-emissions fuels, together with hydrogen.
The corporate over the previous couple of years has efficiently used electricity-powered fracking fleets that it designed. The so-called “digifrac” electrical items are changing fracking engines powered by diesel gasoline or pure gasoline. The electrical variations assist cut back air air pollution and greenhouse gasoline emissions generated at a fracking website.
The corporate final 12 months acquired Houston, Texas-based Siren Power for $78 million. The acquisition of Siren and that firm’s bulk gasoline supply enterprise is a part of a Liberty division referred to as Liberty Energy Improvements, which delivers compressed pure gasoline, hydrogen gasoline, and renewable pure gasoline to work websites, together with drilling operations.
This story shall be up to date.
—Darrell Proctor is a senior editor for POWER (@POWERmagazine).
