Interior chief hopeful Doug Burgum touts ‘innovation neutrality’ in boosting electric grid capacity and in restoring ‘balance’ to the nation’s energy policy.
Interior secretary nominee Doug Burgum told key senators on Jan. 16 that he’d be “aggressive” in opening public lands to oil and gas development in efforts to reverse an “imbalance” in federal leasing policy he said is short-circuiting the nation’s capacity to produce the base-load electricity needed to win “the AI race with China.”
“The thing we’re short of most right now is base load. We need more [energy]. We need an all-of-the-above strategy, but it has to be a balance,” he said during his three-hour nomination hearing before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
Burgum said one of the swiftest, least expensive ways to boost base-load electricity would be lifting restrictions on oil and gas leasing across the 500 million acres of public lands and 1.7 billion offshore acres he’d be managing as secretary of the Department of the Interior (DOI) and chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s newly created National Energy Council.
The former two-term North Dakota governor said an estimated $1 trillion in tax credits, low-interest loans, and grant programs subsidizing renewable energy development over the