Oil and gas executives roll back green energy pledges as they celebrate Trump

“We can all feel the winds of history in the sails of our businesses again,” Amin Nasser, CEO of Saudi Aramco, the Saudi national oil company, said of the vibe at this year’s S&P Global CERAWeek conference. The push for a rapid energy transition to clean power, he said, “was doomed to fail.”

At breakfast presentations, corporate-sponsored receptions and in carefully crafted messages for investors, executives at this year’s Houston meeting repeated administration talking points. They applauded as Trump’s energy secretary ripped into climate goals. And they promoted plans to build a lot more fossil-fuel infrastructure, arguing that the quest for cleaner energy that Joe Biden made a central element of his presidency needs to be supplanted by a recognition that petro fuels are essential to satisfy the United States’ surging demand for power.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright seized on these developments in what amounted to a call to arms against climate-focused energy policy.

“The Trump administration will end the Biden administration’s irrational, quasi-religious policies on climate change that have imposed endless sacrifices on our citizens,” Wright vowed, in an address that drew enthusiastic applause and even some hoots.

Wright said at the conference that the administration had just approved another permit for infrastructure to ship U.S. liquefied natural gas abroad, much to the dismay of climate activists who warn the facilities lock in massive amounts of emissions for decades. In this case, a floating terminal that Delfin LNG is building off the coast of Louisiana has been authorized by the Energy Department to export 1.8 billion cubic feet of gas per day.

It all signaled an industry agenda that has changed starkly since the November election. The firms welcomed a return to their old playbook of drilling and building fossil-fuel infrastructure to meet the energy needs of the artificial-intelligence industry and a boom in manufacturing.

The shift jeopardizes many of these companies’ own goals for eliminating climate pollution. Only 8 percent of energy companies are on track to cancel out their emissions by 2050, a common industry target, according to the consulting firm Accenture.

Days before the Houston conference, BP, once at the forefront of the energy transition, told investors that its “optimism for a fast transition was misplaced,” as it said it would shift billions of dollars in planned investment away from clean energy and into fossil fuels.

Chevron, a champion of the goals in the Paris climate agreement, welcomed the Trump energy agenda, even as he withdraws the United States from that pact.

“We’re seeing some reality come back into the conversation,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said in Houston on Monday. “We’ve got really well-qualified people in the Trump administration. … I think the conversation is going to reset to where it always should have been.”

The executives’ bullish outlook for oil and gas glosses over some realities. Much of the new energy added to the power grid in recent years has been green, according to a report from the American Clean Power Association. Wind, solar and geothermal energy are coming online at breakneck pace. The group says 93 percent of new energy added to the grid in 2024 came from zero-emissions sources, with much of it installed in Republican states.

Oil companies are also reluctant to expand drilling at a time that prices are relatively low and there are not big profits to be made from flooding the market with more barrels. But Trump’s gutting of environmental rules positions the firms to quickly expand drilling should prices swing back up.

In a sign of the hunger for electric power by the tech industry, its executives were at the conference in force, headlining panels about the need to power their data centers and making deals with energy companies to secure more electricity. They stressed their investments in clean technologies, but acknowledged that many of their projects are powered by gas.

“We need to be building near term for that longer-term opportunity, so it’s not missed,” said Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer of Google and its parent company, Alphabet.

She shared the stage with the leader of the electricity giant NextEra, a company that had been so bullish on zeroing out emissions on the nation’s power grid that in 2022 it trademarked the name “Real Zero” for its effort. But on Monday, NextEra CEO John Ketchum was lauding a Trump energy agenda that is hardly in alignment with Real Zero. He even echoed one of Trump’s favorite catchphrases, as he stressed that gas will be a crucial part of the energy mix for years to come.

“What we are seeing under this administration is this incredible growth opportunity to really put America first,” he said.

There were, though, some undercurrents of anxiety over the administration’s hostility toward clean energy incentives. Many of the energy companies convening in Houston are heavily invested in projects that rely on Biden-era subsidies. Ketchum encouraged the administration to heed the advice of 21 House Republicans who this week wrote a letter arguing that many of the incentives — which Trump is targeting for deep cuts — are critical to the president’s goal of making the United States energy dominant.

But other climate initiatives that companies once said were essential had already been abandoned as the conference got underway. Investment giant BlackRock in late January exited the international alliance of climate-focused asset managers that had been partnering with the United Nations to advance the energy transition.

In Houston on Monday, BlackRock CEO Laurence Fink relayed an anecdote about helping the president’s team navigate the economic impacts of AI. He flashed a bracelet that was yet another nod to a Trump catchphrase. It said: “Make Energy Great Again.” And he acknowledged that the enthusiasm for a fast energy transition that he was preaching to investors only a few years ago has cooled.

“We have to think about power and energy in a pragmatic way,” Fink said. “Lets pause for a second. Let’s be clear gas is going to play a major role in the U.S. for tens of years. Maybe 50 years.”

A former head of sustainability at BlackRock, Tariq Fancy, was critical of what he calls energy pragmatism.

“You can see how much the public loses faith in the entire system when these companies say things are core commitments and values and then jettison them two years later because the political winds shift,” said Fancy, who is now a lecturer at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. “It’s not like climate change is suddenly fake. We just had the hottest year on record.”