President-elect Donald Trump appointed Liberty Energy CEO Chris Wright as the next U.S. energy secretary on Nov. 16.

Wright, an industry veteran with experience in solar, geothermal and fossil fuels, was praised amongst industry veterans after his nomination, including Continental Resources Founder Harold Hamm, Brigham Exploration Founder Bud Brigham and Pioneer Natural Resources Chairman Scott Sheffield.

“My dedication to bettering human lives remains steadfast, with a focus on making American energy more affordable, reliable and secure,” Wright said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, in response to his nomination by Trump.

Wright has long-held the belief that energy creates better lives for people and is a catalyst for the growth of "human liberty."

Wright advocated for energy’s role against poverty and climate impacts at Hart Energy’s DUG GAS Conference and Expo in March. Hart Energy is pleased to share the video of his remarks.

Jordan Blum, editorial director, Hart Energy: Thank you very much. That was a really great way to start things off. With everything going on in the Haynesville, all the consolidation occurring. Like they mentioned, it's fantastic that they can now talk about the TG-Rockcliff deal, not pretend like there's nothing going on. Our next speaker is a self-described tech nerd turned energy services entrepreneur. He's a vocal advocate for the industry. He might as well dabble as a motivational speaker. In all seriousness though, he's the founder, chairman and CEO of Liberty Energy, which does have a Shreveport office and a big presence in the Haynesville. He's also the executive chairman of the Bakken producer Liberty Resources. Today he will discuss energy, climate, poverty and prosperity. Please welcome to the stage, Chris Wright.

Chris Wright, CEO, Liberty Energy: Good morning everyone. I thank Hart for holding this fabulous event every year and for everyone here showing up to make it happen. As you'll soon find out, I'm a huge fan of natural gas, and I think it's got a tremendous future. …

So I wrote a book this winter, in the evenings and over my Christmas break, maybe a bad decision, maybe an okay decision. It's on the tables in front of you, and I'm going to summarize some of the takeaways from the book, but there's far more in the book. If I go too fast or a point isn't clear, it's all in the book. The super quick summary is the last 100 to 200 years have just absolutely transformed the human condition. I'm a firm believer that two things catalyze these changes, the growth of human liberty, bottom-up social organization, and this explosion in available energy with the arrival of hydrocarbons, liberty and energy. Could be a good name for a company someday.

The shale revolution that everyone in this room works in the last two decades or so has just transformed energy markets, it's transformed the economic prospects of our country, it's transformed energy security and geopolitics—a chunk of that in the book as well. At the same time that these things are happening, we're seeing rising, louder, more impactful opposition to hydrocarbons. Opposition to hydrocarbons isn't new, but the level at which it's risen is new. It's dominantly among well-off people in well-off countries. So it's not truly a global thing, but it's impactful.

And so the point of the report, this is not an opinion piece, it's not full of policy recommendations or a roadmap. My goal is just to lay out the data of how the energy system works, how that's changing, what do we know about climate change and then a little bit about the trade-offs between the energy systems, climate policies and sort of human flourishing. That's the point of the book. Please give me any feedback.

Energy is just the agent of change. That's a picture from 125 years ago on the left. That could be a picture from 2000 years ago, the same way of land transportation. And look on the right. Look at the way things have changed in just a few generations. Here it is in food production. 200 years ago, 80% of Americans worked in agriculture, 80%. Today, it's 1.7% work in agriculture, and we provide 50% more calories per person for Americans, and we're the largest exporter of agricultural products in the world with 1.7% of the population. One word explains that change, hydrocarbons. Picture on the right, modern medicine compared to medicines as old as societies are old, but it didn't really help much. Now we have just dramatically different healthcare. And if you look at that picture on the right, everything you see is hydrocarbons, the gowns, the equipment, the materials, the energy. The wealth to bring people together, to do controlled studies and to figure out how to solve diseases, hydrocarbons.

All right, so the key takeaway—after writing this book, at the end, I'm like, God, it's kind of long. I wrote a letter in the front that's 16 pages, so it's sort of a long summary, but I wanted it to say, what are the bottom line takeaways? Energy is essential to life and the world needs more of it. If we want a better world, it means you want more energy. The modern world today is powered by and made of hydrocarbons. Hydrocarbons are essential to improving the wealth, health and life opportunities of the 7 billion people on the planet that don't live the fully energized lives of the billion of us who live lifestyles remotely similar to ours. Hydrocarbon supply, more than 80% of global energy, not meaningfully different than at the time I was born, and of course, countless critical materials. I mentioned already, the shale revolution. It's just simply transformative.

Global demand for oil, natural gas and coal are all at record highs and rising. We use this term all the time, energy transition, but the numbers don't support the term. Modern alternatives, and I'll talk a bit about them, like solar and wind and batteries, we've put a lot of money into them, but they work in one slice of the energy pie, the electricity sector.

Policies that make energy more expensive and unreliable compromise people, national security and the environment. Climate change, I've been working, studying, speaking on climate change for 20 years. Fascinating problem. It's real. It's global. It's a challenge. We want to address it, but it isn't remotely close to the world's most important challenge today, although our policy and energy is acting as if it is. It isn't.

And maybe another takeaway on that is zero energy poverty by 2050 is a far superior goal to net zero 2050 for two summary reasons, it's achievable and it's a good thing if we achieve it.

I can't say either about net zero 2050 that's become this organizing principle without a lot of justification. So let's look at the big picture. That top line is global life expectancy at birth. This is from the year 1800, so this is 200 some years. Life expectancy at birth throughout almost all of human history was around 30 years, maybe a little more than 30 years. And then the bottom is the energy stack. Black is wood, traditional biomass. The world was 100% percent renewable throughout almost all of history, and then you see the arrival in gray of coal. Coal first started in England 400 years ago. Coal was a meaningful part of the energy sector in England, but not globally. As coal starts to become meaningful globally, you see life expectancy start to tick up. If you have more energy, you can farm better, you can make more materials, you can do more things.

So life expectancy went from a little over 30 years to 73 years today. You can see it's not coincidence that the timing of these rises go together. More energy, more years of life, better lives. You can see at the top, so it's coal, oil, natural gas. And then at the top, you can see the derivative energy sources that are enabled by hydrocarbons, like nuclear or hydro or wind and solar. All of those energy sources only exist today because we have hydrocarbons to make the materials to build them.

We talk a lot about where energy comes from, but I want to hit quickly what energy is used for. We don't talk enough about this. And I see in the media, in the press, there's not a great understanding of this. The biggest usage of energy by far, and I would maintain by far the most important use of energy, is industrial, meaning making things.

You can't have an electricity sector without building those materials. You can't have a car or a plane without building those machines. That's the base use of energy, is to build all the machines that we then use for transportation. 25% of energy is used in transportation. Maybe another quarter of energy is used in our businesses, commercial applications, in our houses. But think of energy. We don't think about energy enough today as industrial. We have to make things.

And to hit a high point on that, I love this guy, Vaclav Smil, definitely the greatest energy scholar of our time. He coined a great term, “the four pillars of civilization”—four materials: cement, steel, plastics/petrochemicals and fertilizers. We make somewhere between billions of tons to hundreds of millions of tons of these materials every year. And in fact, we use about 20% of global energy just to make these four materials, just to make these four materials.

That's about as much energy as the entire global electricity sector. We talk endlessly about the electricity sector. Sometimes it's treated as synonymous with energy. It's awesomely important, but it's one-fifth of global energy. One-fifth of global energy is also used to make four materials. But without these four materials, there is no modern world.

Energy and geopolitics—I’m going to do this in one slide. So this is zero. The line on the top, Russia is there on the top in that green line. They're a large net exporter of energy, and the amount of energy, their net exports have been growing for two reasons. Their energy production has grown modestly in the last 20 or 30 years, but also their internal economy has shrunk. So their consumption of energy has shrunk, their production has grown, so their net exports have grown. And of course, Russia's known mainly for causing trouble and being an energy exporter.

The next line, if you get on the left side, China in light blue. China, when I first went there about 30 years ago, produced as much energy as they consumed. They had the Daqing Oil Field, one of the world's largest oil fields, which is still a major producer of oil. Of course, they're a giant coal producer, and they were roughly in balance with their energy trade. Then their economy took off. They became the industrial powerhouse of the world, and their demand for energy grew massively. Their production didn't. So as you can see they've rapidly become a huge net energy importer. They're by far the world's largest importer of oil, by far the world's largest importer of natural gas. There you can see the United States, a very different trajectory here. 30 years ago, we were a very significant net importer of energy, and we were growing net imports of energy.

Politicians would tirelessly say, "We're going to make America energy independent." No one believed it, no one did much about it, and, of course, we just grew our net imports. Then something happened—the shale revolution. And just look at the traumatic turnaround in that dark blue line. And in less than 20 years, we went from the largest importer in the world of natural gas to just recently the largest exporter, net exporter in the world of natural gas. We went from by far the world's biggest importer of oil to actually a net exporter of oil and oil products. And then you can see Europe at the bottom. Europe's been, like the U.S., had been a large net energy importer for a long time. They've got a very different direction in policies. So although they've continued to shrink their industrial use of energy by exporting all their industries, I'm not sure that's a great idea, but they keep shrinking their energy consumption, but they shrink their energy production even faster. So they've continued to grow their net imports of energy.

Diving in, this is the United States. How is the U.S. powered today? Where does that energy come from? And what is it used for? We've become where I think a modern wealthy nation is drifting, which is to be an economy run on oil and gas. That's 70% of the energy consumed. Independent of what we produce, 70% of all the primary energy consumption in our country comes from two things, oil and natural gas, highest market share ever. But look at natural gas, that second bar there, that first mustard-colored bar. That's electricity production. 43% of U.S. electricity came from natural gas last year, a record high, but it's just one use of natural gas. Green is transportation. We power a lot of buses and transportation with natural gas. Red is heating and cooking. I'm pro food and pro being warm in the winter. We use a lot of natural gas for that.

Red is industrial usage. This is making steel, making petrochemicals, making materials. And blue is raw materials, right? Petrochemicals not only require hydrocarbon energy, they are hydrocarbons. My suit, my clothes are hydrocarbons, so are my fancy shoes. Coal, third biggest source of energy in the U.S., it shrunk dramatically just because natural gas has outcompeted it in the marketplace. Nuclear is our fourth largest source of energy. Wood is still our fifth largest source of energy. Think of a paper mill and pulp and burning waste products and wood, that's not huge, but that's our fifth largest source of energy. Wind is sixth, hydro is seventh, solar is eight, and they're used dominantly in one place, electricity. So just your eyes can see, how does the United States power today?

One question... I'll just make one comment about the world as a whole. There's about a billion people that have automobiles and fancy lifestyles and travel to visit their grandmothers on airplanes and have lots of clothes. Five of the 8 billion people on the planet today are walking around in hand washed clothes, just like all of our ancestors did—enormously time- and labor-intensive. More than half of humans in the world, they just don't have the wealth and the energy to run a washing machine yet. They want one. If you talk about it in oil consumption, that lucky 1 billion that are fully energized consume 13 barrels of oil per person per year. The other 7 billion consume three barrels per person per year on average. And what do they aspire for? That's obvious. Every one of them, of course, wants to live an increased and better energized lifestyle, longer, healthier, more opportunity, rich lives. For the other 7 billion, just to get halfway to the oil consumption of the lucky 1 billion, that's more than a doubling of global oil production.

So I've just... My whole life, I'm constantly hearing predictions of peak oil. My whole thing is based on what? What kind of wish? What kind of world do you want to see to have this happen? Oil consumption grew more in the last decade than the decade before that, and the decade before that grew oil consumption more than the decade before that. So we have growing demand, faster-paced growth and absolute demand for oil over the last 30 years, but yet we constantly are predicting a peak. 7 billion people should just stay where they are. That's not going to happen.

Energy transition—we hear this all the time. So in this book, I just dug into the data. Let's look—the world in 2010 consumed about 500 exajoules of energy, and today we consume about 600 exajoules. Awesome. Growing energy production across the globe.

Where did that hundred extra exajoules come from? I just assume the 500 exajoules we already had stayed in place, no change. Just the additional energy, where did that come from? Fastest growing energy source on the planet, by far, natural gas. 40% of the growth in energy globally over the last 12 years came from natural gas. Second fastest growing energy source on the planet: oil, 24% of that growth in energy. Coal, 14%, third fastest growing energy source.

The percent of the global energy sector that came from oil and gas grew in the last 12 years. The absolute amounts, of course, grew, but even the percent of market share grew. Wind was the fourth growing energy source, 9% of the growth in energy, solar at 7%, 16% of the growth in energy. Energy transition to me is when a new energy technology is supplying more than just the growth in energy and it's actually starting to displace or transition another energy source. We're just not even close to that, not even close to that.

U.S., this is production instead of consumption. How much new energy do we grow in the United States over the last same 12 years? … You can see coal, meaningful decline in U.S. coal production. Well, that's for a reason, because surging natural gas production displaced it. But if you look at even net out the negative coal, oil and gas production in the U.S., 85% to 90% of the growth in U.S. energy production came from hydrocarbons.

You get a squint to see wind and solar over there in the right over the last 12 years. They're there, but the numbers are a lot different than I think you hear all the time. This is just raw data. These are not Chris Wright opinions. Heck, I went to college to work on nuclear energy. I worked on solar energy in graduate school and geothermal afterwards. I have no oil and gas background, no family royalties. I'm just an energy guy. I don't care where energy comes from as long as it's affordable, reliable and makes people's lives better. And I believe in numbers more than stories.

So we're 600 exajoules today. We want to get to 800 exajoules by 2050 for people to keep having economic progress. The last 100 exajoules came dominantly from hydrocarbons. I hope we get some more help in the next 200 exajoules.

And let's look at new energy technologies and the impact they had. So this is starting in 1970. This is nuclear energy in the United States. We built a bunch of plants, I think an awesome addition to our energy system. Nuclear is still almost 20% of our electricity production. Here, it is plotted in exajoules, it's not trivial. It rose for about 25, 30 years, and then it's mostly plateaued since then. Here's U.S. wind and solar, up to about two exajoules annually per year. Now let's say on a global basis, that's nuclear globally, again, came out strong. Then we just saw it stop. People lost confidence in it. We stopped building nuclear power plants. They're building them in China and India, but we've been shutting them down in Europe and Japan.

Global wind and solar. So this is a huge amount of money. This is somewhere between $5 [trillion] and $10 trillion. Depends how you count the dollars. And you can see it is growing fast, wind and solar. But on this plot, you can see last year, wind and solar provided 12 exajoules of energy. Global consumption, 600 [exajoules]. Everyone's an engineer in this room or knows one. That's 2% of global energy. Five to $10 trillion, 2% of global energy. Just keep that in context. You hear the number 4[%] and 5[%] all the time in the press, and even from the EIA. What's the difference between my number and their number? The difference is mine is right and theirs is wrong. And the EIA does this funny trick. They take the energy produced from wind and solar, and then they multiply it by two and a half. Well, if you multiply something by two and a half, you make it a lot bigger. You turn 2% into 5%. But it's shameful.

And since my book was published, they put out a note that they're re-looking at that and they might stop doing that. They have an excuse for this thermal efficiency thing. But as we go to heating and trying to operate a firm electricity grid, there's just no reason to multiply it. Let's just report the real numbers.

Here's shale, U.S. shale. So this is from the year 2000. Look at the surge in growth of it. Look at the scale of new energy from U.S. shale even compared to the global wind and solar industry. So this is 2022 data, 58% of total U.S. energy production. Last year, the 2023 data, well over 60% of all the energy, not all the oil and gas, the total energy produced in the United States comes from the American shale revolution, 10% of global energy. Next time I do this book, I'm going to include Canada, and we'll put in sort of North American shale. But this is the kind of scale the world needs for more energy.

I'm going to have to wrap up here pretty quick. There's tons more in the book. There's stuff on health and hydrocarbons. This is showing... The yellow dot is your risk of death from environmental causes, which is dominantly indoor and outdoor air pollution versus the energy system you live in. If you live in an energy system dominated by oil and natural gas, you have very clean air, indoor and outdoor, and dramatically lower death from environmental factors. If you live in an economy dominated by wood and coal, it's just, there's more air pollution and there's more deaths. This is the same data globally just based on per capita oil consumption on the x-axis and risk of death from environmental factors on the x-axis. A lot of the opposition to our industry is it's bad for human health. Again, the data tells a different story.

Climate change, again, there's a fair amount of details in climate change. I'm going to end by, of course, it's real. We've grown atmospheric concentration of CO2 by about 50%. I'm going to show just two slides on climate change, and then go to Q&A. This is global weather damages as a percent of global GDP. We only have pretty good data on that for 32 years. And does everyone see that firing up scary trend that we should take into account the threat to our world from growing extreme weather? It's going down, and it's been going down since we've been collecting data. In the report, you'll see there's not been an increase in hurricanes and floods and droughts, tornadoes. Droughts are actually on a slightly downward trend because a little bit warmer world is a little bit wetter world. But the key thing is just to be honest about stuff. Climate change is a real thing, but we have taken a phenomenon that's real but slow-moving and modest and called it a crisis. 20% of children self-report nightmares about climate change. Kids in college are less inclined to have children now because they're worried about their future.

And I'll end with this final slide. This is deaths from extreme weather over the last century. 100 years ago, about 500,000 people every year died from extreme weather. Last year, that number was 11,000, 500,000 to 11. The running decadal average is about 27,000. So we've had a 95% decline in the number of people that die from extreme weather while global population quadrupled. So your risk of dying from extreme weather is declined by about 98%, and we have the highest ever fear about extreme weather among children and people. So look, I'm all about new energy, I'm all about our industry getting better and continuing to improve it, but it's very important that the dialogues and trade-offs we have are based around facts and actual data and not memes and scare stories.

And so I think we should always talk about our industry and how we're improving, how we're getting better, how we're lowering pollution, how we're empowering and making people's lives better. Of course, people want to hear about our greenhouse gas intensity. We should report it. But when we report it on page one and we drum it endlessly, we are just feeding this same mania that climate change is the world's biggest problem by far. It's not.

There's my list of what I think the world's biggest problems are: malnutrition, basic healthcare, indoor air pollution, outdoor air pollution, education for people so they can raise their skills and improve their quality of life, rule of law, property rights. These are factors that massively change people's quality of lives. All of these problems, every one of them, are dramatically more important than climate change. The people who study climate economics say just that—that these issues are far more important than climate change.

Let's look at the data. Let's be honest. Let's not just go with the meme because it's politically popular or it's popular with the media. Honesty and facts, that's the road forward. Jordan.

JB: Thank you so much.

We probably just have time for a quick question or two, so let me just try and squeeze something in. But obviously things usually come down to money, so I just wanted to get your take on how hard it is to get people on Wall Street to understand and agree with the points you're making.

CW: Actually not terribly difficult. Wall Street investment firms, when they first get this book, say, "Thank you so much for providing data so we can respond back to pension funds and state things who..." People hear a meme and they want to run with it, but they're data-driven people too. I spoke at a responsible investment summit recently that had a bunch of university professors that were on boards and just presented something similar to what I did here, and the response was, "That's compelling. I've just never seen that data before. Where's that book? Where's that data?" People are massively more movable on this topic than you think. But if no one engages, if no one just puts things in context, of course people believe, well, we hear about climate change the most, it must be the biggest problem, but it's just not.

JB: And you don't hear much talk anymore about natural gas as a so-called bridge fuel, or at least a very, very long bridge.

CW: Yeah, even that term, a transition fuel. There's just sort of a meme that's been invented that the energy system's going to change in one decade or three decades, or maybe it's five decades, but we're all transitioning. We don't have replacements for the vast majority of uses of oil and natural gas. We don't even have those things. So I think it's a pretty safe bet that the energy system in 2050 will not look meaningfully different than it is today. And again, I don't celebrate that. Liberty Energy, our company, we own part of a small modular reactor company that's going public in two months. I will be on their board. We are in next generation geothermal. Look, I want all energy technologies that can do things, but the advantages of hydrocarbons are just so gigantic that we should just be realistic about the role they play and will continue to play. And I believe the fastest growing energy source in the next 20 years, almost for sure will be natural gas, will continue to be natural gas.

JB: Very good. Well, thank you so much for being here. We're fresh out of time. Please give Chris a hand. Thank you.

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