Oil and gas executives kicked off an annual energy summit last week by cheering a President Donald Trump-led reset they say is overdue after living through a years-long regulatory and corporate push toward green energy, The Washington Post reports.
“We can all feel the winds of history in the sails of our businesses again,” Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, said of the vibe at this year’s S&P Global CERAWeek conference. The push for a rapid energy transition to clean power, he says, “was doomed to fail.”
At breakfast presentations, corporate-sponsored receptions and in carefully crafted messages for investors, executives at this year’s Houston meeting repeated administration talking points. They applauded as Trump’s energy secretary ripped into climate goals. And they promoted plans to build a lot more fossil-fuel infrastructure, arguing that the quest for cleaner energy that Joe Biden made a central element of his presidency needs to be supplanted by a recognition that petro fuels are essential to satisfy the United States’ surging demand for power.
As the newspaper reports, Energy Secretary Chris Wright seized on these developments in what amounted to a call to arms against climate-focused energy policy.
Wright said at the conference that the administration had just approved another permit for infrastructure to ship U.S. liquefied natural gas abroad, much to the dismay of climate activists who warn the facilities lock in massive amounts of emissions for decades. In this case, a floating terminal that Delfin LNG is building off the coast of Louisiana has been authorized by the Energy Department to export 1.8 billion cubic feet of gas per day.
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