Burgum Leans Away From All-of-the-Above Energy

 

 

April 29, 2025 - When he fought for votes in North Dakota’s Republican gubernatorial primary in 2016, tech executive Doug Burgum did not have the financial backing of the state’s powerful oil and gas lobby.

Burgum — who is now Interior secretary — labeled that money a conflict of interest.

As governor, Burgum sought to push North Dakota to be carbon-neutral by 2030. He stressed “the importance of an all-of-the-above energy policy” when then-Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm visited the state in 2021. And he chaired a state commission that approved North Dakota’s first injection well for the geologic storage of carbon dioxide.

But as a member of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet, Burgum has taken a sharply different tack.

Last week, the Interior Department unveiled a plan to speed up the development of domestic energy and critical minerals. The new emergency permitting procedures don’t apply to renewable sources such as wind and solar, reflecting Trump’s priorities and his Jan. 20 energy “emergency” executive order. Carbon capture and storage technology, or CCS, was also left out.

 

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum speaks during the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland earlier this year. The former North Dakota governor has helped to promote fossil fuels under President Donald Trump.

Photo: Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

The new policy arrived days after Interior moved to halt construction on the Empire Wind project off the coast of New York, arguing it was approved “without sufficient analysis.” That has left observers wondering what’s next from Burgum.

“The exclusion of solar, of onshore wind, of CCS from these new policies may not be the type of action that we saw with Empire Wind, but it’s noteworthy by itself,” said Travis Annatoyn, counsel at Arnold & Porter who was a former deputy solicitor for energy and mineral resources at Interior in the Biden administration.

While green critics slammed Interior, the American Petroleum Institute applauded the department’s plan to speed up environmental reviews.

“We welcome the administration’s focus on improving the permitting process and look forward to continuing to work with Secretary Burgum to advance U.S. energy dominance,” said Holly Hopkins, API’s vice president of upstream policy at the oil and gas trade group, in a statement to POLITICO’s E&E News.

Burgum is working now for a president whose bid to return to the White House benefited from major donations tied to the oil and gas industry, as well as Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

“We are cutting through unnecessary delays to fast-track the development of American energy and critical minerals,” Burgum said in a statement.

On Friday, Burgum told attendees at a Semafor conference that the Trump administration is “very confident” about withstanding lawsuits over its accelerated permitting plans. Many observers, however, expect legal challenges.

Besides resources such as oil and gas, Burgum said the overhaul also includes reviews for geothermal, hydro and any energy projects that would be considered baseload power.

He criticized federal incentives for electricity sources considered intermittent, such as wind and solar. But CCS projects rely heavily on the federal 45Q tax credit, and the oil and gas industry has benefited over the years from expensing intangible drilling costs.

The Trump administration has put out a series of orders, directives and memorandums highlighting fossil fuel development. A draft strategic plan from Interior, detailed last week by E&E News, aims to “streamline” processes for developing coal, oil and gas on public lands, which Burgum has often referred to as “assets.”

The White House has defended Burgum’s performance, including in a statement last week.

“Under his leadership, Secretary Burgum is doing incredible work to advance American Energy Dominance and remove crippling red tape,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, adding that Trump and Burgum “will continue their important economic and national security mission to unleash our country’s abundant natural resources.”

The Western Organization of Resource Councils — which represents a group of community organizations — criticized the administration’s approach to energy policy.

“The country is producing far more oil and gas than it can use while experiencing a clean energy boom,” said Barbara Vasquez, the organization’s board chair. “It is clear that the administration is pandering to fossil fuel corporations already flush with tremendous wealth while denying Americans [a voice] — especially farmers, ranchers, and other rural Americans throughout the West most affected by fossil energy projects.”

Wind industry growth

 

Between 2016 and 2023, while Burgum was governor of North Dakota, nameplate wind capacity in the state increased more than 50 percent, according to the Department of Energy’s statistical arm. As of January, coal-fired power plants made up nearly half of North Dakota’s net electricity generation, and non-hydro renewable sources made up roughly 40 percent of the mix, federal data showed.

An openness to wind generally reflects how Burgum was viewed when he became governor of the upper Midwestern state: as a supporter of many industries who saw value in the growing renewables sector.

But that is not the man some critics see today.

“I think he’s really kind of moved more towards supporting the petroleum and coal industries as Interior secretary than he [did] as the governor of North Dakota,” said Scott Skokos, executive director of the Dakota Resource Council, a North Dakota environmental group.

In the 2016 GOP primary in North Dakota, Burgum’s opponent for governor — who was attorney general at the time — received campaign donations from the state’s oil and gas industry, according to The Bismarck Tribune.

The attorney general and governor sit on the state’s Industrial Commission, which regulates oil and gas, so Burgum called that a conflict of interest. Still, during the general election, Burgum did receive donations from some oil executives, according to the Duluth News Tribune.

A spokesperson for Interior did not respond to a request for comment about Burgum’s position during the gubernatorial campaign in 2016. The North Dakota Petroleum Council also did not comment.

Skokos said he’s seen an “internal contradiction” with Burgum as Interior secretary. For example, he noted that Interior has elected to forgo an environmental impact statement for thousands of oil and gas leases in the West while at the same time halting construction on a wind farm off the coast of New York known as Empire Wind, arguing it was approved “without sufficient analysis.”

“He’s discriminating against one industry and not the other,” Skokos said.

“First term, mid-second term, Burgum was considered to be a friend of the wind industry, and I don’t know that that would be the case as Interior secretary,” Skokos said. “Now it seems that he has a bias toward just the fossil fuel industry.”

Burgum’s growing skepticism of renewable energy coincides with his joining the Trump administration.

The American Clean Power Association did not respond to a request for comment. Earlier this month, the association called the administration’s halt of the construction on Empire Wind “the literal opposite of an energy abundance agenda.”

“We need streamlined permitting for all domestic energy resources,” the association’s CEO, Jason Grumet, said in a statement. “Doubling back to reconsider permits after projects are under construction sends a chilling signal to all energy investment.”

Trump has vigorously derided wind energy and sought to boost fossil fuel production to respond to what he’s labeled an energy “emergency,” though the U.S. is already the world’s largest oil producer.

At the Friday event, Burgum was asked about his view of renewable energy.

“I wouldn’t say that there’s any hostility towards, quote, renewables — there’s hostility or at least concern … that we’ve gone too far towards massive tax subsidies for sources of energy that are by definition intermittent,” he said.

Carbon capture and storage

 

An “outspoken proponent” of carbon capture and storage efforts. “Very supportive” of the industry. The man who turned North Dakota into a “hub for innovation.”

Those phrases have all been used to describe Burgum.

As governor, Burgum not only introduced a target of making North Dakota carbon-neutral by 2030, he also cheered DOE’s decision in late 2023 to make up to $350 million available to a carbon capture retrofit of a coal-fired power plant in central North Dakota.

And, during his final week as governor in December, Burgum voted to approve injection permits for a large, interstate CO2 pipeline project seeking to permanently store CO2 underneath the state.

What specific actions Burgum may end up taking on carbon capture as Interior secretary, however, remain to be seen.

Burgum was governor for eight years and he’s been Interior secretary for about three months.

During his confirmation hearing in January, Burgum said carbon capture can be used to tackle fossil fuel emissions.

And after he was confirmed, he applauded EPA’s decision to grant top regulatory authority over Class VI injection wells to the state of West Virginia — North Dakota was the first to get that designation. The wells are used to send CO2 underground for geologic storage.

The White House also included a call out to CCS in its Earth Day message last week, a move welcomed by groups like the Renewable Fuels Association.

Carbon capture is on “the list of strategies that this administration is, we think, very interested in pursuing when it comes to American energy dominance,” said Geoff Cooper, CEO of the Renewable Fuels Association, in an interview.

As Interior secretary, Burgum hasn’t talked about carbon capture as much as fossil fuel production, but did endorse the technology Friday.

“If we want to solve the issue of CO2 — if that’s the last remaining issue — there are hundreds of ways to do that and in places like in my state of North Dakota, we were doing carbon sequestration,” Burgum said.

One long-awaited rule that Interior has yet to release is a rulemaking for storing carbon dioxide off the United States’ coasts.

Jessie Stolark, executive director of the Carbon Capture Coalition, said the pro-CCS group looks forward to engaging with Burgum and Interior on permitting priorities and “clarifying regulatory pathways and procedures for carbon storage on public lands.”

“This includes publishing and finalizing regulations authorized by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, including issuing and finalizing regulations for carbon dioxide storage on the Outer Continental Shelf, and providing further guidance for storing CO2 on federal lands,” Stolark said in a statement Thursday.

Still, Annatoyn with Arnold & Porter said Interior is “clearly comfortable” unveiling major policy initiatives with speed, so “it might be the case that we see really dramatic action” from Burgum on CCS, even if that hasn’t happened so far.

The planned draft rule for CO2 storage on the Outer Continental Shelf is likely to be a complex piece of rulemaking, Annatoyn said.