While campaigning for a second term in office, President Donald Trump often summed up his energy plans by invoking a slogan from the 2008 election cycle, “drill baby, drill.”
Hours after his inauguration on Jan. 20, as part of a flurry of more than 200 executive orders, he announced the declaration of a national energy emergency, signaling a move toward strengthening the country’s energy security.
The declaration highlights the need to remove unnecessary regulations from the energy industry which have stifled growth and investment, said Energy Workforce & Technology Council President Tim Tarpley.
“The president's declaration is a critical step forward in securing our nation's energy future,” Tarpley said. “By rolling back burdensome regulations and prioritizing permitting reform, we can unlock the full potential of American energy production, create jobs, and provide affordable, reliable energy for consumers across the country.”
Also hours after being sworn in to a second term, Trump lifted the previous administration's freeze on export permits for LNG.
The administration’s executive order effectively reversed a pause on permits for new projects that former President Joe Biden put in place in early 2024 to study the environmental and economic effects of the booming export industry, according to Reuters.
As Trump’s administration pivots from regulatory rollbacks to practical implementation, experts like Kevin Book, managing director of independent energy research firm Clearview Energy Partners, highlight the logistical challenges of realizing these changes. Seeing results “will take time,” likely 18 to 24 months, Book said.
“Actually approving new LNG facilities for authorization to non-free trade agreement countries, that’s what we paused, that might take weeks to months,” he said. “The Biden administration put in place a study that took a new interpretation of what is or isn’t consistent with the public interest. That’s what a law called the Natural Gas Act requires.
“It takes a long time to move this very big ship that is the largest energy production economy in the world.”
Trump’s transition team recommended his administration cut off support for EVs and charging stations and access to components from China, Book said.
“When it comes to the EV part of that green transition, there are several components that are…available for revision immediately,” Book told Fox News. “The designation of a foreign entity of concern, a supplier of batteries — meaning China — was relatively lenient…under Biden.”
Book, who heads the research team at Clearview Energy that covers oil, natural gas, refined products and coal policy, said that swift action to reverse the U.S. transition to green energy may have an added layer of complexity by presidential advisor Elon Musk, who co-founded and leads the world’s EV manufacturer Tesla.
The president has an apparent disdain for EVs. But Musk’s influence on any new energy policies is less certain, according to CNN, as he has been tasked with a new commission cutting government spending and agency jobs.
The Biden administration was climate-focused, but those Trump has surrounded himself with are likely to carry out the fossil fuel industry’s wish list to juice oil production and demand for its products, according to CNN.
Former North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, Trump’s new energy czar and pick for secretary of the interior, will oversee much of this work alongside Chris Wright, a Colorado-based natural gas fracking CEO and Trump’s pick for secretary of energy. Both are fossil fuel advocates, but each has worked with clean energy.
The oil industry boomed in North Dakota under Gov. Burgum’s tenure, but electricity from wind more than doubled from 2015 to 2023, becoming North Dakota’s second-biggest electricity source, behind high-pollution coal.
Wright runs a natural gas fracking company and also sits on the board of an advanced nuclear energy company and has invested in a geothermal startup that is working to convert underground heat into electricity to power hundreds of thousands of homes.
Trump has also talked about "unleashing American energy" — specifically oil, which he has called "liquid gold."
The tagline “all of the above,” has been around for decades, and refers to a set of policies that support oil and natural gas — and simultaneously, every other form of domestic energy, including solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear. The phrase appears to have first been promoted by the fossil fuel lobby before being embraced by a Democratic president, Barack Obama.
For Obama, the phrase meant supporting natural gas and pursuing cheap gasoline while also investing in renewable power. Today, it's a mainstream Republican position on energy.
President Biden, some argue, also supported "all of the above" in practice — although he didn't use the phrase. But he only supported it in the near term. For the long term, he promoted green energy instead of fossil fuels, talking about a "clean energy transformation" that would remake the economy and address the climate crisis by gradually phasing out oil.
