Trump’s oil and gas donors don’t really want to ‘drill, baby, drill’
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Donald Trump wants oil companies to “drill, baby, drill" on the first day of his presidency, but his fossil-fuel benefactors have a different agenda. Many of the tycoons who backed the Republican’s victorious campaign say what they need help with is shoring up demand for their products—not pumping more fossil fuels, which they have little incentive to do.
They are pushing for policies that would lock in fossil-fuel use, such as easier permitting for pipelines and terminals to shuttle fossil fuels to new markets. They also favor eliminating Biden administration policies meant to put more electric vehicles on the road. Under President Biden, shale companies produced record amounts of oil and natural gas as crude prices rebounded from the pandemic’s depths and then soared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
But the industry is also confronting the early stages of a long-term shift away from fossil fuels, as well as concerns that gasoline consumption has peaked in the U.S. Trump handed shale donors their first big return on investment by nominating Liberty Energy Chief Executive Chris Wright, a fracking booster and fossil-fuels champion, to lead the president-elect’s Energy Department. When Dan Eberhart, the CEO of oil-field services firm Canary, met with Trump during a fundraiser at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida this summer, Eberhart had a unique request.
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