Trump plans to nominate fossil exec, nuclear-startup board member to head DOE

Multiple national news organizations reported Saturday President-elect Donald Trump intends to nominate Chris Wright, CEO and founder of Liberty Energy, a Denver-based oilfield services company, to be the next secretary of energy.

According to his Liberty biography, Wright is a self-described “tech nerd” who previously founded Pinnacle Technologies in the 1990s, a company involved in mapping for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for commercial shale gas.

Wright also sits on the board of Oklo, a California-based company looking to develop small modular reactors for deployment at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory and elsewhere in the DOE nuclear weapons complex.

In a video posted last year on LinkedIn, Wright criticized the term “climate crisis” and media-and-governmental “fear mongering” on carbon emissions and extreme weather. An engineer, Wright holds degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as the University of California at Berkeley.

“As Secretary of Energy, Chris will be a key leader, driving innovation, cutting red tape, and ushering in a new ‘Golden Age of American Prosperity and Global Peace,’” Trump said in a Truth Social post cited by ABC News.

“Putting a champion of dirty fossil fuels in as the leader of the department would be a disastrous mistake,” the Natural Resources Defense Council said of the announcement in a Saturday post on the X social media site.

Trump, the former and future president, has announced plans to create a National Energy Council, which would include DOE. Trump’s planned nominee for the Interior Department, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R), would reportedly lead that council.

Both Wright and Burgum, like other cabinet picks, must still be confirmed by the Senate.