The New Energy Secretary is Decent
He's an extremely 2020s Energy Secretary
On 16 November 2024, President-Elect Donald Trump selected fossil fuel executive Chris Wright as his Cabinet-level Secretary of Energy and member of some new Council on National Energy.1 The natural impulse is to decry Wright as yet another Republican President’s oil stooge, but Wright isn’t just an oil guy—he’s a shale guy.
Wright is the founder and CEO of Liberty Energy, a $2.9 billion shale (“fracking”)2 company. It looks like a big shop until you compare it to ExxonMobil’s market cap of $530 billion. Liberty Energy was founded in 2010 on the ground floor of the shale energy boom in the United States, and they operate differently from the oil giants you know and hate. Based on their 2023 10-K report, Liberty has twice or thrice the asset turnover and half the debt load of a “normal” oil company. In context, it’s a lightweight, fast, even scrappy operation.
Think of Wright as a Venn-diagram fusion of a startup founder and an oil executive, selling one of the most geopolitically relevant products of the decade. The fast, low-cost, and extremely American petroleum products of shale have driven down energy costs nationwide, enabled greater domestic production of chemicals and plastics, knocked down coal consumption, and offered Europe an alternative to Russian energy at the exact time they needed it the most. Shale might not be the energy source of 2050, but it’s certainly the energy source of the 2020s.
And now a shale guy is…well, he won’t be in charge of DOE. He won’t control the mission, or the budget, or what programs live and die, or who gets hired and fired outside of his direct advisory staff. He will represent DOE in events, relay The Energy Situation™️ to the President, and put out fires as needed.3 To that end, the most important parts of his job are what he thinks and how he says it. For the real action, look to John Barrasso (R-WY), Ranking Member (and likely future Chair) of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
Zero Energy Poverty 2050
Luckily, Chris Wright is a chatty fella—Liberty Energy runs these “breakfast” lectures hosted by Wright himself, and the company released a book-length report called “Bettering Human Lives 2024.” The report holds up ten key ideas, but we can condense it even further:
The only alternative to hydrocarbon-powered industrial wealth is pre-industrial agrarian poverty.
The hype and investment in wind and solar has not returned enough energy to make a difference.
Climate change is not an apocalypse—it’s something humans can, will, and have adapted to.
My LinkedIn feed is full of people who would immediately dispute these points—you might be one of them. And I want to caution you that Chris Wright is not thinking about electricity production, heat pumps, or light-duty vehicle electrification.
He’s talking about (in his words) the four pillars of modern civilization: steel, cement, fertilizer, and plastics. Steel, cement, and critical minerals require industrial heat that is only feasible with fossil fuels. Nitrogen-based fertilizers and plastics rely on petroleum feedstocks like propane, ethane, and naphtha. The core of industrial production relies on extracted hydrocarbons at every level, and the “non-carbon” options simply move the emissions and environmental impacts elsewhere. This is why he laughs off climate activism: the loudest voices for decarbonization are grad students, spreadsheet jockeys, and thought leaders who are ignorant of the sausage-making that is heavy industry.4
Solar panels, wind turbines, and battery energy storage require more land, more steel, more mined material, and more upfront capital than oil and gas infrastructure. The decarbonized alternatives to jet fuel, hydrocarbon feedstocks, coke in blast furnaces, and seasonal energy storage aren’t economical. I suspect that might change in ten years, but Wright doesn’t see the angle. This is what he means by, “There is no energy transition.”
Another speaker in Wright’s orbit phrases it another way: out of reliable energy, affordable energy, or clean energy, you can only pick two. You could balance all three with an all-of-the-above energy policy, but that would require writing off net-zero decarbonization as an unaffordable luxury.5
Wright doesn’t believe net zero carbon by 2050 is feasible or desirable. His focus is zero “energy poverty” by 2050. He grants that climate change is real, but that humans can adapt. Switching from wood and coal to oil and natural gas reduces SOx and NOx pollution. Improved forestry and flood management reduces the impact of natural disasters even as they worsen. Abundant energy enables desalination, air conditioning, industrial agriculture, and the wealth necessary to even think about environmental cleanup.
Wright prefers a warming world to a poorer world.6
I’m more bullish on alternative energy than he is.7 And I think the EIA is right to focus on end use energy instead of source consumption.
But his map of energy in 2024 is correct.
An Energy Secretary of the Age
I tried, but I can’t think of a better option for a late-2020s Energy Secretary. A supermajor oil executive would be overly cautious and behind the times. A DOE insider would be too complacent about the vetocracy the federal government has become. A climate scientist would blanch at the reindustrialization that the United States will need to do whether China rises (and takes Taiwan) or falls (into dissolution).
Wright is straight-talking, globally oriented, and dialed into the most geopolitically important energy source of the 2020s. He can do little to fix or dismantle DOE, but he will walk into discussions, keynotes, and briefings with an accurate model of the world. I would prefer an Energy Secretary that thinks decarbonization is worth paying for, but I’ll take what I can get.
I hope he takes fugitive methane emissions and associated natural gas flaring seriously.
I hope he musters support for more interstate transmission lines and nuclear generation.
But I worry that he’s not a lackey.
I worry that someday, he’ll tell Trump that there’s a limit to how much more you can drill when the Waha hub price for natural gas is sometimes negative.
And then the President will fire him and impulsively do something that looks good on TV but makes everything worse in five years.
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For all his fervor to “drain the swamp,” Trump continues the tradition of addressing the problems of government with more government. See also: Department of Government Efficiency
Energy insiders typically don’t use the term “fracking.” Shale oil and gas are enabled by two technologies: hydraulic fracturing (which you’ve heard of), and horizontal/directional drilling (which you haven’t heard of). Calling this category “shale” is more technically accurate and helps potential climate radicals blend into mainstream energy conversations.
My brief experiences with leadership in my late twenties suggest that it’s primarily running meetings, signing things, and putting out fires that have escalated to your desk.
I once attended a B Corp networking mixer in Boston, and I met a cadre of attractive climate girlies who were really enthusiastic about decarbonization but exclusively worked in marketing, communications, or retail consumer products. It’s pretty easy to handle the Scope 2 emissions of an email.
This speaker gives a pretty compelling reason for why China is leading the development and production of renewable generation, batteries, and electric vehicles: China has very precarious access to oil and gas, and they need the extra options from alternative energy sources.
The big pitch for solar and battery energy storage is that the prices are coming down fast. For two cases in this direction, see Scott Alexander and Casey Handmer.