U.S. President-elect Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with House Republicans at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Washington, D.C., November 13, 2024.
Allison Robert | AFP | getty images
President-elect Donald Trump was selected on Saturday. liberty energy CEO Chris Wright has been nominated as the next U.S. Secretary of Energy.
Liberty Energy is a Denver-based oilfield services company with a market capitalization of $2.7 billion. The company’s shares rose nearly 9% on November 6 after President Trump won the US presidential election, but the stock has since fallen.
Wright serves on the Board of Directors. greatOpenAI, a nuclear startup backed by CEO Sam Altman, is developing micro reactors.
Wright will also serve on President Trump’s Council of National Energy, the president-elect said Saturday. The commission will be led by North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, President Trump’s nominee for Secretary of the Interior.
Wright denied that climate change poses a global crisis that must be solved through a transition away from fossil fuels.
“There is no climate crisis, and we are not in the midst of an energy transition,” Wright said in a video posted to his LinkedIn page last year. “Humans and all complex life on Earth would not be possible without carbon dioxide. Therefore, the term carbon pollution is absurd.”
“There is no such thing as clean energy or dirty energy,” Wright said. “All energy sources have positive and negative impacts on the world.”
Trump described Wright as “a leading technologist and entrepreneur in the energy sector.”
“He has worked in the nuclear, solar, geothermal, and oil and gas sectors,” the president-elect said in a statement Saturday.
“Most importantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American shale revolution that promoted American energy independence and transformed global energy markets and geopolitics,” President Trump said.
President Trump has pledged to increase fossil fuel production to reduce energy costs, but analysts and some oil executives say the president will have little impact on U.S. oil and natural gas production.
Since 2018, the United States has produced more crude oil than any country in history, including Russia and Saudi Arabia, according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA).
