The Senate voted Monday to confirm Chris Wright as the nation’s 17th secretary of the Department of Energy.
Eight members of the Democratic caucus joined 51 Republicans to approve the former fracking executive’s bid to lead an agency that, despite its name, focuses far more on research, science and the management of the nation’s nuclear arsenal than on the fossil fuels Wright spent the bulk of his career drilling for. Two Republicans ― Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) ― and one Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.), abstained.
Along with Lee Zeldin, President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, Wright, 60, was widely seen as one of the new, right-wing administration’s least controversial Cabinet nominees.
A Democrat from his home state, Sen. John Hickenlooper (D-Colo.), introduced Wright at his confirmation hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last month. Through the three-hour public interview session before the Senate’s energy committee, Wright said he recognized the threat climate change poses but ranked a lack of steady, cheap energy as a higher priority.
He pledged to put a particular focus on stemming the tide of worsening blackouts on the U.S. power grid and modernizing the country’s nuclear weapons.
Wright is best known as the founder of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based pioneer in hydraulic fracturing, the drilling technique known as fracking that sparked a U.S. oil and gas boom at the start of the 2010s.
But the executive repeatedly cited his past work on solar panels and battery storage, and emphasized his longstanding interest in nuclear power, the most efficient source of zero-carbon electricity and one of the most climate-friendly technologies the Trump administration is expected to champion. Wright sat on the board of Oklo, a California-based reactor startup, and studied nuclear fusion in college.
“Do I wish we could make faster progress? Absolutely,” he said during the hearing. “Are there things we can do … through the Department of Energy to accelerate development of new energy technologies that are really the only pathway to address climate change? Absolutely.”
Still, he insisted that fossil fuels were here to stay and pushed back against an Energy Department study issued in December that found increasing exports of natural gas threatened higher energy prices at home. Gas provides the bulk of U.S. electricity, and GE Vernova, the country’s leading manufacturer of gas turbines, is seeing a spike in orders as data centers proliferate to serve the growing computing demands of artificial intelligence software.
Speaking Monday before the Senate, Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) credited the technology Liberty pioneered with transforming his state into one of the nation’s most productive oil producers, going from “100,000 barrels per day when I started as governor” back in 2000 to a high of 1.5 million barrels per day.
“Our nation’s vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas are not a liability, they’re strategic assets,” Hoeven said.
During last month’s hearing, Wright insisted to Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto (D-Nev.), whose sun-soaked state is among the fastest-growing users of solar power, that he remained committed to ramping up the buildout of more photovoltaic plants.
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When Trump returned to office a week later, however, he issued a flurry of executive orders targeting wind energy in particular and barring new permits on turbines in waters or on land the federal government controls.
Solar power seemingly made the cut — that is, until a Department of the Interior memo issued a 60-day pause on new approvals for all renewable energy development on public lands, including solar power.