US President-elect Donald Trump announced on Saturday that he had nominated Chris Wright as both Secretary of Energy, and member of the newly formed Council of National Energy.
“Chris has been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in energy. He has worked in nuclear, solar, geothermal, and oil and gas. Most significantly, Chris was one of the pioneers who helped launch the American Shale Revolution that fueled American energy independence, and transformed the Global Energy markets and geopolitics,” Trump said in a statement.
The Council of National Energy, he explained, “will consist of all Departments and Agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American energy. This Council will oversee the path to US energy dominance by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sectors of the economy, and by focusing on innovation over longstanding, but totally unnecessary, regulation.”
Wright is the CEO of Liberty Energy, a fracking and oilfield services company. He will require Senate confirmation to lead the Department of Energy.
Fracking, short for hydraulic fracturing, is an oil and gas extraction technique that kicked off the “shale revolution”, greatly boosting companies’ energy production potential and helping to make the US the world’s top producer of oil and gas.