The Senate confirmed Chris Wright to lead the U.S. Department of Energy on Monday, putting the former oil executive in a key position to help shape President Trump’s energy policies.
Mr. Wright, the founder and chief executive of Liberty Energy, a fracking firm, was confirmed by a vote of 59 to 38, with support from all Republicans present and a smaller number of Democrats. He would be the 17th secretary of energy, a position that was created in 1977.
At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Wright said his top priority was to “unleash” domestic energy production, including liquefied natural gas and nuclear power. He also told Democrats that he believed climate change was a “global challenge that we need to solve” and that he would support the development of renewable energy like wind and solar power.
At the same time, Mr. Wright said he would “work tirelessly” to support Mr. Trump’s “bold” energy agenda. The president has frequently dismissed climate change as a hoax, disparaged wind and solar power and said he wants to expand the use of oil, gas and coal, the burning of which is driving climate change.
The Energy Department plays a central role in developing new energy technologies. The agency oversees a network of 17 national laboratories that conduct cutting-edge research as well as a powerful loan office that has backed dozens of low-carbon energy projects, including battery factories in Ohio and Tennessee and two giant nuclear reactors in Georgia.
Mr. Wright would also oversee approvals of liquefied gas export terminals, which the Biden administration tried to slow, angering industry groups. Mr. Trump has already ordered the Energy Department to restart reviews of proposed export facilities.
The Energy Department is a sprawling agency. About 80 percent of the department’s $52 billion annual budget goes toward maintaining the nation’s nuclear arsenal, cleaning up environmental messes from the Cold War and conducting research in areas like high-energy physics.
Under the Biden administration, the department aggressively supported new clean energy technologies such as advanced nuclear power, enhanced geothermal energy, green hydrogen fuels, next-generation batteries and more. Backed by new funding from Congress, it issued tens of billions in loans and grants to everything from firms making low-carbon cement to power companies building new transmission lines.
At his confirmation hearing, Mr. Wright mostly declined to go into details about how he would run the department.
Some conservative groups have urged Mr. Wright to reorient or even shutter the agency’s Loan Programs Office, which was given roughly $400 billion in loan authority by Congress to bring promising energy technologies to market. Under the Biden administration, the office finalized more than $60.6 billion in loans and loan guarantees to companies that were mining lithium, restarting a shuttered nuclear plant, converting wind and solar power into hydrogen fuels and more. It also issued $47 billion in conditional loans that have not been finalized.
As of Jan. 17, there were still 160 companies seeking more than $200 billion in loans and loan guarantees. But the loan office’s work has largely been paused since Mr. Trump took office, and it is unclear what will happen to those applications.
Most major environmental groups and many Democrats opposed Mr. Wright’s confirmation, saying that he downplayed the risks of a warming planet. In a social media post in 2023, Mr. Wright wrote, “There is no climate crisis, and we’re not in the midst of an energy transition, either.” On a podcast last year, he said that climate change would have “a slow-moving, modest impact two or three generations from now.”
On podcasts and in speeches, Mr. Wright has frequently made a moral case for fossil fuels, arguing that the world’s poorest people need access to oil, gas and coal to enjoy the benefits of modern life that rich nations take for granted.
Still, some Senate Democrats joined Republicans in voting to approve Mr. Wright’s nomination. They included Ruben Gallego of Arizona, Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper of Colorado, Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, Ben Ray Luján and Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, as well as Angus King, an independent from Maine who normally caucuses with Democrats.
“While I do not agree with Mr. Wright on a number of issues, he has committed to working with us in good faith” on issues like investing in national labs and building out high-voltage power lines, Mr. Heinrich said last month.
Mr. Wright graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and did graduate work on solar energy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1992, he founded Pinnacle Technologies, which created software to measure the motion of fluid beneath the Earth’s surface. The software helped bring about a commercial shale-gas revolution.
Mr. Wright started Liberty Energy in 2011, and the company has worked with others on geothermal energy and small, modular nuclear reactors.
Mr. Wright holds 2.6 million shares in the company, which were worth roughly $47 million based on Monday’s closing stock price. In a written statement to the Senate he promised to step down from Liberty Energy and divest his holdings within 90 days after being confirmed. According to his ethics agreement, he is scheduled to get paid his last bonus from the company in March.
Lisa Friedman contributed reporting.