Amid the spate of appointments to the incoming Trump administration announced over the past few days are two that have the president-elect and the US oil industry quite excited.

Donald Trump appointed former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum as his “energy tsar” and interior secretary on Friday, following that up with the announcement of oilfield services group Liberty Energy’s chief executive Chris Wright as his energy secretary on Saturday.

Donald Trump’s push for more fossil fuel production could end in oversupply, hurting prices.Credit: Bloomberg

Burgum will chair, and Wright will be a member of Trump’s new National Energy Council, which a statement from Trump on Friday said would “consist of all departments and agencies involved in the permitting, production, generation, distribution, regulation, transportation, of ALL forms of American energy.”

“This council will oversee the path to US ENERGY DOMINANCE by cutting red tape, enhancing private sector investments across all sector[s] of the Economy, and by focusing on INNOVATION over long-standing, but totally unnecessary, regulation,” he wrote.

Trump has made it clear that he wants to gut the climate-related elements of Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, remove the outgoing administration’s subsidies for cleaner energy production and use and dramatically boost fossil fuel production.

Burgum, who played a key role in rounding up big donations to Trump’s campaign from the oil industry, and Wright, an advocate for greater fossil fuel production who says there is no climate crisis or energy transition, will have a mandate to increase US oil and gas production.

Trump, who describes oil as “liquid gold,” whose directive to the oil and gas sector is to “drill, baby, drill” and who says that, had he won the presidency in 2020,........

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