Energy Secretary Chris Wright has outlined eight ‘Day 1 Priorities’ he aims to accomplish, several of which he laid out in his inaugural address at the Energy Department headquarters Wednesday.
Wright, the CEO of Colorado oilfield services company Liberty Energy, said he will prioritize refilling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), modernizing the U.S. nuclear stockpile, streamlining federal permitting for energy development, and abiding by the mantra: ‘Advance energy addition, not subtraction.’
In his remarks at the department’s building near Pierre L’Enfant Plaza in Washington, D.C., Wright spoke about his childhood love of science and how that focus led him to pursue work in the field.
Wright said he met President Donald Trump about a year ago, and the two businessmen connected over their support for unleashing American energy prowess and highlighting how U.S. energy dominance positively affects many other aspects of life.
Wright said Trump had a ‘simple vision’ that ‘energy is good and that we need more’ of it, particularly domestically-sourced.
‘So we just connected. And he asked me, ‘Would you be secretary of energy?’ And I said, ‘Boy, if I’m asked to serve my country, I don’t have to think about that one.”
He called the Energy Department the gem of the American government and said he has long been entranced by contemporary advancements in the field, from German chemist Otto Hahn splitting the atom in 1938 to Adm. Hyman Rickover creating the first nuclear-powered machines in submarines.
‘I want to better energize our country, strengthen our country, advance science… and get the politics out of all of this.’
‘Energy is not political: it is the basic infrastructure that allows us to live great lives, to allow whatever our dream is, whatever our vision is,’ he said.
Wright added that there is no such thing as clean or dirty energy, and that in reality, there is ‘no free lunch’ when it comes to the byproducts of the production process: ‘It’s about tradeoffs.’
Other ‘day one’ priorities Wright has outlined include a return to ‘regular order’ on liquefied natural gas exports.
Wright has been a longtime advocate of hydraulic fracturing – famously going as far as drinking fracking fluid to prove environmentalist critics wrong about its effect on nature.
Pennsylvania and North Dakota are epicenters of fracking, while New York retains the subterranean resources to do so but is under a statewide ban.
Wright has also pledged to strengthen the power grid’s reliability and security.
There have been blackouts occasionally in recent years from overtaxed grid areas, notably in California around 2001.
There have also been security threats to energy transmission, including from a Catonsville, Maryland, woman who conspired to destroy the region’s power grid.
Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said Sarah Beth Clendaniel ‘plotted to disable the power grid around the entire Baltimore region’ in 2018, after becoming acquainted with a Florida man who espoused White supremacist ‘accelerationist’ ideologies.
Under Wright’s tenure, the Energy Department also plans to promote home appliance affordability and choice – a break from the Biden administration’s efforts to restrict usage of gas stoves.
Former President Joe Biden also spent part of the nation’s SPR in what critics called a bid to assuage energy price spikes for political purposes. Wright said he would promote the refilling of the SPR, as well as modernize the U.S. nuclear stockpile, Fox News has learned.