Trump's ‘Drill Baby Drill’ message set to take center stage at CERA conference

Top energy industry figures converge on Houston this week for their biggest gathering since Donald Trump returned to the White House to champion fossil fuels and undo Joe Biden’s climate legacy.

The president himself won’t appear at the annual Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) conference, but Trump appointees are expected to talk up the Republican’s petroleum-led program as embodied by the slogan: “Drill Baby Drill.”

Since returning to Washington less than two months ago, Trump and his team have laid siege to the existing economic order at a dizzying pace, launching trade wars against allies and neutering government agencies the president and his libertarian allies dislike.

Trump made energy central to his agenda with his day-one “Unleashing American Energy” executive order, vowing during his inaugural address to “end the Green New Deal” in favor of “that liquid gold under our feet.”

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Trump’s January 20 executive order represents a potentially wide-ranging attack on tax incentives embraced by energy companies to advance billions of dollars of energy transition projects connected to laws enacted during Biden’s presidency to mitigate climate change.

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But the abrupt shift to Trump from the climate-focused Biden likely “turns 2025 into a paralyzed year where folks are hesitant to push on any kind of decarbonization,” said Dan Pickering of Pickering Energy Partners, a Houston advisory and investment firm.

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More drilling?

The schedule for the five-day Houston CERA gathering lists three top Trump appointees, including Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who will open the proceedings on Monday morning.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Environmental Protection Agency head Lee Zeldin are slated to speak later in the week.

Wright, an energy industry entrepreneur and executive, and Burgum, the former governor of North Dakota, appeared together last week to tout an announcement by Venture Global of an $18 billion expansion of a liquefied natural gas export facility in Louisiana.

The event highlighted Trump’s reversal of a Biden freeze on permitting new LNG export capacity.

Trump has ridiculed the environmental concerns at the center of Biden’s policy, championing LNG exports as a way to strengthen America’s ties with energy importing countries, as well as a way to boost the US exploration and production industry.

But there has been widespread skepticism about Trump’s message urging the industry to significantly boost oil and gas drilling in order to lift output and lower energy prices. Wall Street has signaled a clear preference for robust industry profits that can continue to allow for dividends and share repurchases.

Besides the Trump officials, other speakers include CEOs from Chevron, Shell, Saudi Aramco and other oil giants; senior government officials from energy importers like India and exporters like Libya; top power and tech industry executives.

There are panels on low-carbon technologies, the electricity supply challenge to support artificial intelligence research, OPEC’s influence in setting oil prices and the shifting geopolitics around energy and international trade.

Questions for Europe

European officials are to appear on panels focused on Europe at a crossroads after shifting from Russian supplies  and the role of energy in the future of the continent’s security.

In the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, US LNG “played a super-important role” for Europe as the continent sought to lessen its dependence on Russian gas, said Jonathan Elkind, a fellow at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.

But European leaders have been forced to reckon with the current state of the transatlantic alliance in light of Trump’s alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin and tensions with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.

Whether a Russia-Ukraine peace deal might lead to a restoration of some Russian natural gas exports to Europe remains an open question.

In the short run, including at CERA, Elkind expects European officials to continue to speak optimistically of the prospects for more US LNG.

But “at the back of their mind… it’s pretty hard to tell whether Donald Trump is friend or foe and that’s a shocking thing to say after 70 years of a close alliance,” Elkind said.