President Donald Trump will visit Texas on Friday to tout the administration’s energy policies on the heels of his State of the Union address.
Trump’s trip to Corpus Christi, including remarks and an energy briefing, comes as the administration highlights efforts to cut costs and boost energy production. The president is trying to convince Americans that the economy is booming as he starts the second year of his second term in office.
“His huge focus on energy, everything we can do to increase energy production and drive down prices, to me, that’s a pro-American dream agenda,” said Department of Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
The agenda has included a new focus on Venezuelan oil following the U.S. capture of Nicolas Maduro.
“And we just received from our new friend and partner, Venezuela, more than 80 million barrels of oil. American natural gas production is at an all-time high because I kept my promise to drill baby drill,” President Trump said during his State of the Union address.
Wright estimates, in the near term, the U.S. could potentially see two-thirds of a million barrels per day sent to the United States.
“So, a steady stream of oil, and a lot of American oil refineries were built in the 60s and 70s, and at that time, Venezuela was the largest exporter of oil in the world. So our refineries are built to handle a range of crudes, but they were specially tuned for this sort of viscous, heavy crude from Venezuela,” Wright said.
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Wright recently returned from Venezuela, where he confirms he received a commitment from Delcy Rodriguez, Maduro’s former second-in-command, now leading the country, to continue cooperation.
“I think Venezuelan authorities know they run the government locally in Venezuela, but they are entirely dependent on the United States government for their cash flow. That is a way to enforce very positive behavior. Now it's a long way to go. This is a country that sunk low for 20 years. We're not going to fix it in two months, but the progress has been immense already, and they're motivated to continue to do that,” Wright said.
The administration has urged companies to invest in repairing Venezuela’s oil infrastructure. Trump convened more than a dozen oil and gas executives at the White House shortly after Maduro’s capture.
“Chevron, who's been incumbent there for 100 years, has committed to invest hundreds of millions of dollars this year and ultimately several billion over the next few years, to massively grow their production,” Wright said, adding other companies are also considering "significant new investments."
"We've got all sorts of mid-sized American companies that haven't been in Venezuela, that are dying to go,” he added.
The U.S. government does not intend to provide security guarantees, though, according to Wright.
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“I think the improvement in the security situation has already happened significantly. It'll continue to improve. But look, the U.S. government, we're not going to spend taxpayer money, we're not going to have boots on the ground, so we're not going to provide guarantees. But what we are doing is using our enormous power and our enormous leverage to drive improved behavior in Venezuela, and the results are quite evident,” Wright said.
“A number” of general licenses have been issued, according to Department of the Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
“That first wave is oil and gas and getting them the equipment, often US-made equipment that we need to help them increase their production. So, both the technology, the equipment, and the people to help raise that up. And then the next wave is going to be on critical minerals, because there's a huge mining opportunity in Venezuela," he said. "Many American companies had mining operations down there 20 or 25 years ago. They all got nationalized. Those industries collapsed. Their production is way down, and we've got a lineup of companies in that industry that are teed up and want to head back. Some of them may be going back as soon as next week."
The U.S. has sought to expand critical mineral access. It has signed 11 new critical minerals frameworks or memorandums of understanding with countries this year, and is creating a reserve.
“We're going to have strategic critical mineral reserves, United States critical mineral reserves, across the 60 different critical minerals," Burgum said. “Zero taxpayer dollars. Don't have to fight to get it through Congress. It's going to be a combination of $10 billion from the EXIM Bank, $2 billion approximately, of private capital. That's going to be the initial capital, which will allow the United States to start storing and having, again, a vault or a secure reserve of these critical minerals, so that you can't have a country, specifically China, threaten to cut off, cut off the shipment of these minerals,” Burgum said.
Burgum says it will be across the 60 different critical minerals in the most economically and strategically important locations.
But as artificial intelligence continues to grow, and amid questions about the cost of data centers, President Trump said he negotiated a ratepayer protection pledge.
When pressed on deals made with companies, Burgum said, “It’s been a series of conversations with the five biggest tech companies.”
“We have had very slow growth in demand for electricity because we got more efficient in how we used it in this country, everything, you know, refrigerators, you know, home heating appliances. Everybody just got better and better at using less electricity. I mean, conservation was actually working, so we had very slow growth,” Burgum said.
“Now comes along for the first time in human history, you can take a kilowatt of electricity and convert it into intelligence. Now, the demand for that is huge, and so if we call it BYOP for power, bring your own power, so that these companies can, will build a power, new power generation off-grid. Use that power to power their intelligence manufacturing. It's not really a data center in the way that you traditionally would think of one. These are manufacturing plants where you're manufacturing intelligence. So they turn power into intelligence, and then they shift their final product out on a fiber optic cable, and they never touch the grid,” he added.
Meanwhile, the administration is seeking to boost energy production, including nuclear. The Department of Energy announced $2.7 billion invested toward domestic enrichment earlier in the year.
“We’re going to have enriched uranium. We're ramping up fuel production in the United States, fuel fabrication. We're going to deal with the waste disposal problem that's been around for 70 plus years,” Wright said.
At the same time, the president also seeks to restart nuclear weapons testing.
When asked about the type of testing, timing of a restart and location, Wright said it’s being looked at.
“We can test our weapons without any nuclear yield in the explosions. The president has asked us to look at how to go even further, how to look at it. There's some novel technologies, I think, that will achieve exactly what we want. Likely don't involve nuclear yield, but that's an ongoing dialogue. The President's just dead set on America must be in the lead. We must be in the lead. Lead. Do everything we can to advance our weapons security and reliability,” Wright said.
