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By EPN Staff

This is the third part of a three-part series from EPN’s exclusive interview with U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.

When President Donald Trump returned to office this year, his administration found the nation’s Strategic Petroleum Reserve in shambles. The Biden administration had drained so much oil in such a short period that it damaged the facility and left the nation with the lowest reserve in more than a generation.

In an exclusive interview with Energy Platform News, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright described the former Democratic administration as having drained the reserve in 2022 “to lower gasoline prices and help them do better in the election. Unfortunately, it worked. It did help them win that election but at the cost of compromising American security. And it was done so fast it did some damage to the facilities as well.”

The current administration is working to repair and refill the reserve to better insulate the country from geopolitical risks that could shock energy markets, Wright said.

Why it matters

The prior policy preferences that resulted in damage to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and undermined national and state economic development prospects have been abandoned in favor of policies that drive affordability, reliability and national security, Wright said.

“There’s no longer going to be an all-of-government war against hydrocarbons,” the secretary told EPN. Democratic policies “sounded like a climate change thing, but of course it wasn’t. It just meant oil, gas and coal are going to be more expensive, and American taxpayers are going to pay more.”

Going forward, Wright said, the federal government wants to work with states to develop energy policies that strengthen communities and promote prosperity – in the states and abroad.

“We produce more energy today than we consume. That’s awesome,” Wright said. “But our ability to produce way more energy than we consume is right in front of us. And what we’d produce that way more energy for is reshoring manufacturing in the United States.” That includes building more data centers, steel manufacturing plants, plastics and fertilizer production facilities and more.

“Economic opportunity is going to come back,” he said, “but we need trained workforces, motivated workforces ready to go. It’s America, so I think we’ll work that out, but it is absolutely an area for state, federal and commercial cooperation.”

The bigger picture

So-called climate policies promoted by progressives and the previous administration have served primarily to weaken the nation, states and communities by spending billions on inefficient renewable projects and pushing critical, energy-intensive commercial operations overseas, Wright said. But making it hard to open a factory or produce natural gas or operate a mine in the U.S. isn’t a sustainable solution. “You don’t change demand,” he said. “You just produce somewhere else in a less beautiful way.”

And that compounds the challenge of solving a problem – climate change – that progressives purportedly champion. “The biggest source of ground level smog in the whole western United States is blown in from Asia,” Wright noted. The U.S., meanwhile, is capable of producing energy more responsibly, and more efficiently, than other countries, and doing so would create significant economic opportunities that would help Americans, as well as people in foreign nations, he said.

“Somehow the ‘environmental’ or climate movement in the U.S. gave up doing math a decade or two ago.”

Additional context

Wright dismissed opponents’ efforts to stop federal and state efforts to authorize new energy and manufacturing projects. “These things are going to be built,” he said. “Yes, people will try to roll the clock back, but I don’t think we’ll have any possibility of going back to the level of craziness we had the last four years.”

For states, he said, that means it’s important to develop and implement policies that empower people. And the way to do that is through streamlined permitting, common sense and a recognition of the value that responsible domestic energy production and manufacturing can provide. “As your state produces more energy, it’s better for the citizens of your state. It can bring industry to your state. That’s a great thing.”

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