Wright Man for the Job

The U.S. may finally get an Energy Secretary who understands energy's importance and how it actually works.

"The right man can make a good job out of any job." - William Feather

In his 2021 book The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, controversial energy philosopher Alex Epstein argues that despite being portrayed as net negatives to humanity and the planet, for the lucky one billion humans with ready access to them, fossil fuels have on the contrary enabled longer life expectancies, better nutrition, the elimination of backbreaking labor, incredible innovation, freedom, prosperity, and high living standards unthinkable only a century ago. For having the temerity to point out these unassailable facts, on the issue of fossil fuels and “climate change”, he is a whipping post for legacy media Organs, EcoStatists™, and “environmentalists” alike.

You would have to try hard to find a writer and advocate in the energy space who has been more routinely subjected to the disgusting and slanderous term “climate denier” than Alex Epstein. Indeed, a Google search of the words “Alex Epstein climate denier” returns over 12,000 results.

The idea of not only acknowledging that fossil fuels have consequences – climate and otherwise – but vigorously advocating for the many benefits they provide human beings has been a third rail for executives of publicly traded oil and gas corporations for two decades or more. But one man stands as a unique and highly qualified exception.

On November 16, President-elect Trump named Chris Wright, founder, and CEO of Liberty Energy, as his nominee for Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy. The New York Times wasted no time ensuring the enlightened citizens of America and western civilization why they should be concerned. The title Trump Picks Gas Executive As Energy Secretary made certain to spin Wright’s actual industry experience as a negative, and the subtitle only bolstered The Times reliable image as a dependable regressive progressive water carrier: “Chris Wright is a TV-ready evangelist for fossil fuels who lacks government experience”.

You will forgive us for wondering what the hell this makes current U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm.

In our view, no Chairman or CEO of any publicly traded business in the oil and gas industry has made the moral case for the human-improving services hydrocarbon energy provides more courageously, shamelessly, and articulately over the last 5+ years than Chris Wright. Moreover, it is safe to say that there has never been a U.S. Energy Secretary whose own innovation, direct efforts, leadership, and risk taking have more directly contributed to both energy security and – in case you believe “climate change” is a serious and immediate problem – reducing U.S. CO2 emissions than Chris Wright.

Wright is an MIT-educated engineer and an entrepreneur, first as a tech junkie, then turning to energy. In the 1990s, Wright was part of a team of talented geologists and engineers at a firm called Pinnacle Engineering who innovated a variety of methods that optimized hydraulic fracturing (aka “fracking”), applying technology, geophysical fluid dynamics, risk capital and a lot of horsepower. Their improvements revolutionized an existing technology and led to exponential increases in efficiency and productivity removing “tight” oil and gas from source rock. The fracking innovations Wright, Pinnacle and Liberty brought forth were central to and helped unleash what is known today as the “shale revolution.”

The company Wright founded and leads today, Liberty Energy, went public in January 2018, and today has annual revenues of ~$5 billion. In 2020 Liberty acquired the fracking business of Schlumberger, making the firm the second largest fracking field services operator in North America.

Liberty does not drill oil and gas wells. Coming behind the drillers, Liberty’s fracking technology effectively uses water to break open tight layers of oil and gas-rich rock formations and holds those pores open, making available to humanity enormous volumes of oil and gas thought to be unrecoverable as recently as the turn of the century.

Nearly 20% of all oil and gas wells in the U.S. and Canada are fracked by Liberty Oilfield Services. About 8% of total US primary energy production from all sources comes from wells fracked by Liberty. This means that the hydrocarbons flowing through wells fracked by Liberty provide roughly twice as much energy as the entire U.S. solar and wind industries combined.

“Environmentalists” have made no shortage of effort to stop fracking across the advanced world on grounds ranging from “climate” (fracking is the sure death of earth’s atmosphere and ecosystems) to groundwater contamination to “methane leakage.” In the UK and Europe, they have succeeded.

And while fracking and the combustion of the copious amounts of oil and gas it has unleashed have environmental impacts like every other energy-generation technology, in the U.S. one unassailable fact remains: no technology has directly contributed to more CO2 emissions reductions from the electricity generation sector than the substitution of natural gas for coal unleashed by fracking. In fact, the U.S. has achieved similar if not greater reductions than the EU as a whole and many of its member nations mostly on the basis of this fuel switch. In the U.S., these emissions reductions occurred in the absence of European EcoStatism’s heavy hand and despite said “environmentalists” objections.

Driving Europeans Mad | Source: U.S. EIA, Ember, Statista

Consider what has occurred over the last three plus decades. Two years before Wright founded Pinnacle Technologies in 1992, coal accounted for 52% of total U.S. electricity generation, with natural gas providing a mere 17%.

After more than two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidization (or more), wind and solar still only account for 14% of U.S. electricity generation. Thanks to fracking innovations for which, by any objective measure, Chris Wright must be given significant credit, natural gas now fuels almost 45% of U.S. electricity, with coal reduced to about 15%.

In the U.S., the reduction in CO2 emissions from electricity generation brought about by the fuel switchover from coal to natural gas has been nothing short of stunning. From 2005 (a year commonly used as a basis for measuring advanced nation’s CO2 emissions) to 2022, U.S. CO2 emissions from power generation dropped a jaw dropping 37.5%. Fracking innovations and markets did most of that, not subsidizing Spinning Green Crucifixes™ and solar panels.

We don’t need no stinkin’ regulation!

An educated man with a degree in mechanical engineering from MIT and with graduate work at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley, Chris Wright has traveled to ~55 countries, and witnessed firsthand on many occasions across the world what lack of energy – particularly in the forms of electricity, heating and transportation fuel – means to lifting humans out of generations of poverty and driving economic growth and development. He is wide eyed about the correlation between primary energy consumption and prosperity. He unapologetically prioritizes raising the nearly 7 billion living beneath U.S. and western European living standards up to that level over reducing CO2 emissions.

Within a few years of founding Liberty, Wright began receiving pressure to put out an Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) report in addition to the firm’s annual report. But Wright was not about to put out a traditional ESG report that simply checked boxes about CO2 emissions reductions or the diversity of his workforce. Wright turned ESG reporting for oil and gas companies on its head. In keeping with his deeply held beliefs that affordable, reliable, secure energy is essential for lifting 5-7 billion people out of poverty, he flipped the script. Rather than issuing a traditional, bland ESG report inwardly focused on counting CO2 molecules and diversity of the workforce, by 2020 Liberty began issuing something of an antidote to traditional ESG reports. Liberty’s Bettering Human Lives report does so across the spectrum – from how the company recruits, treats and retains employees, to its innovations substituting natural gas for diesel exhaust, dust and CO2 emissions in the field, to how providing access to affordable hydrocarbons is certain to lift billions out of poverty in a direction closer to Western living standards.

The introduction to the original Bettering Human Lives report (2020) began with a simple statement (emphasis ours):

“It is simply not possible to discuss the environmental and social impacts of our industry without considering the environmental and human impacts of the absence of our industry.”

In a Message from the Chairman, Wright noted in that first Liberty “ESG” report that “Liberty’s mission is to better human lives.” The 2024 version of the report opens with the same message from Wright.

In 2024, Wright and Liberty created the Bettering Human Lives Foundation. Central to the BHLF mission is providing clean cooking fuel and stovetops to the 2+ billion humans still cooking over wood, crop waste and dung, a problem which still leads to more than 2 million early and preventable respiratory deaths globally each year. A picture is worth a thousand words, so we’ll let the screen shot below from BHLF’s website do the talking:

Not brought to you by a former governor or Juris Doctor | Bettering Human Lives Foundation

Chris Wright correctly notes that there is no revolutionary “energy transition” when billions of humans in the developing world still rely on wood, crop waste and dung for cooking and heating, have little or no distributed electricity, and their only transportation is by foot, bicycle, or motorcycle. Until the world’s wealthy nations help bring those people up to our living standards, efforts to keep them from using hydrocarbon resources (their own or others) to reach those standards on the basis of “climate change” are immoral. This is a view we share with Chris Wright, Alex Epstein, Doomberg, Robert Bryce and many others.

If you are an “environmentalist”, hate fracking and voted for Kamala Harris, you need not worry that, as U.S. Energy Secretary, Chris Wright will give orders to frack under your house without your permission, causing earthquakes, foundation damage, and/or leaving you with flaming tap water. While the job originally focused on energy production and regulation when created in the 1970s, it soon evolved more towards the development of more efficient forms of energy and eventually took on responsibility for managing partially depleted nuclear fuel (erroneously called “nuclear waste”). The Energy Secretary also oversees the department’s responsibility for the building, maintenance, safeguarding and disposal of the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. But you can expect that Wright will work tirelessly, smartly, and relentlessly to help secure domestic abundant, affordable, reliable, on-demand energy and to expand access to the same to U.S. allies as well as the developing world.

If you believe “climate change” is an “existential crisis” and requires that the U.S. rapidly decarbonize, then natural gas to nuclear power for electricity is the obvious answer to achieve that end without destroying the economy and sacrificing living standards. That view aligns with Wright’s who, in addition to being an innovator in fracking for oil and natural gas, is an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear energy. He sits on the Board of Directors of Oklo, the advanced nuclear energy technology company chaired by OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman.

Domestically, geopolitically, and in terms of lifting billions of humans to Western living standards, Chris Wright’s nomination for U.S. Energy Secretary is a win-win-win. He is sure to support expanding domestic oil and gas production, additional pipeline capacity, and additional American liquified natural gas (LNG) export terminals. If Trump’s strategy is to weaken Putin’s and Russia’s influence and that of Middle Eastern oil producers by flooding the global market with oil and gas, the strategy is far more likely to succeed than the doomed-to-fail Russian sanctions after its invasion of Ukraine. Expanding U.S. LNG exports will keep a lid on landed LNG prices globally, which will increase American influence abroad through energy not bullets. At the same time, more natural gas production will help the developing world eventually switch over from coal to natural gas, thereby further contributing to decarbonization (for those worried about such matters) where it will eventually matter the most.

We close by noting that while the legacy media Organs, EcoStatists™, and “environmentalists” will portray Wright’s nomination as a “threat to undo Obama’s and Biden’s ambitious climate agenda”, poison groundwater, melt the planet, serve Liberty Energy’s corporate interests (which need no help), and selectively quote his words to portray him as a “climate denier”, all will be careful to avoid Wright’s contribution to U.S. emissions reductions and, especially, the tenth Key Takeaway from Liberty’s 2024 Bettering Human Lives report:

“Zero Energy Poverty by 2050 is a superior goal compared to Net Zero 2050.”

Given our tag line (“The planet is going to be fine. Worry about the people”), and what we have written in nearly two years of posts, we enthusiastically and wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

America may finally get an Energy Secretary who not only actually comes from the energy industry but has played an instrumental and profound role in its evolution. Chris Wright is the right man for the job. We hope he sails through the confirmation process.

Channeling Javier Milei, long live affordable, reliable, abundant, on-demand energy, for the advanced world and particularly for the billions in the developing world without it, damn it!

If you want to learn more about Chris Wright and his experience, views on the environment, and Liberty Energy, please listen our friend Robert Bryce’s two excellent podcasts, here and here. If you would like to learn more about the Bettering Human Lives Foundation, you can find the link here.

“Like” this post if you’re going to be thankful America may get an energy expert for Energy Secretary on Thanksgiving tomorrow.

Leave us a comment. We read them all, reply to most and the your contribution is energy for this machine.

Subscribe to environMENTAL for free below.

Share this post. Helps us grow. We’re grateful for that.