The US Senate on Monday confirmed Chris Wright, a fracking executive, to be President Donald Trump’s energy secretary, Report informs via Reuters.
The vote was 59-38, with seven Democrats and one Independent, who caucuses with Democrats, crossing the aisle.
Wright, 60, the CEO of Liberty Energy since 2011, has said he will step down from the company once confirmed. He wrote in a Liberty report last year he believes human-caused climate change is real, but that its hazards are “distant and uncertain.” He has also said that top-down governmental policies to curb it are destined to fail.
Wright will be in charge of an agency whose budget is around $50 billion, around half of which goes toward maintaining the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
He will also be in charge of the department’s 17 national labs that cover everything from research fusion energy to supercomputing.
In his nomination hearing, Wright said his first priority is to expand domestic energy production including liquefied natural gas, a super-chilled exportable form of the fuel, and nuclear energy.
The US became the world’s top LNG exporter in 2023 and shipments could double before the end of the decade.
Wright and Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, are expected to dismantle aspects of former President Joe Biden’s climate policies and push for more fossil fuel infrastructure including gas pipelines and power plants.
