At their confirmation hearings on Wednesday, the two men in line to oversee the United States’ global energy policies, Senator Marco Rubio and the fossil fuel executive Chris Wright, are expected to assail President Biden as overly concerned with climate change.
According to a spokeswoman, Mr. Wright, who was picked to lead the Department of Energy, will say that Mr. Biden “viewed energy as a liability instead of the immense national asset that it is.” President-elect Trump has pledged to immediately begin rolling back electric-vehicle tax credits and to undo a pause on new permits for gas export terminals.
But the Biden-Trump split, at least on major policy issues like natural gas exports, battery supply chains and competition with China, may turn out to be more in tone than in deed.
In an interview before the confirmation hearings began, Mr. Biden’s top energy diplomat at the State Department, Geoffrey Pyatt, used similar language to Mr. Wright’s. Energy is “a strategic asset to strengthen our allies” and “a national security attribute,” Mr. Pyatt said, referring in no uncertain terms to fossil fuels. If confirmed as Secretary of State, Mr. Rubio would choose Mr. Pyatt’s replacement.
Mr. Pyatt noted that U.S. crude oil production is 70 percent higher than it was 8 years ago and that U.S. exports of liquefied natural gas, which went from near-zero in 2016 to now dominating the global market, are set to double over the course of Mr. Trump’s upcoming term. “The U.S. is an energy giant,” he said. “We are energy secure in a way we’ve never been before. We have no dependence remaining on the Middle East from an energy standpoint, which is quite different than where we were a decade or two ago.”
Under Mr. Biden’s administration, the United States is currently producing more oil than any nation at any time in history. It is also the world’s largest producer of gas, and its leading exporter. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mr. Pyatt, a former ambassador to Ukraine and Greece, spearheaded U.S. efforts to wean Europe from Russian fuels by replacing them with U.S. gas, liquefied and shipped from the Gulf Coast across the Atlantic Ocean.
Mr. Pyatt also noted that, in congratulatory calls from Europe and Japan that Mr. Trump received upon winning re-election, there was unsurprising reaffirmation of gas’s key role in trade and mutual security.
The Biden administration’s pause on approving new applications for gas export terminals will almost certainly be reversed by Mr. Trump, but experts said the original move had little bearing on U.S. dominance of the global gas market and any efforts Mr. Trump may make to further increase exports would be met with the reality of uncertain long-term growth in the market as the price of renewables continues to drop around the world.
“Generally speaking, I think we’re likely to see changes in policy but continuity in energy-market outcomes,” said Jason Bordoff, who leads the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
The main difference may well be, Mr. Bordoff said, that the Biden administration couched its energy policies in terms of emissions reduction and climate change, and the Trump administration will more publicly and explicitly allude to gas prices and national security, even if the latter clearly underpinned Mr. Biden’s policies, too.
Even if Mr. Trump manages to slow growth in the U.S. domestic market for electric vehicles, for instance, he will still be compelled by a fear shard by the Biden administration over China’s dominance in battery supply chains “at a time of growing demand for power for artificial intelligence and data centers,” Mr. Bordoff said.
China currently controls most of the global supply chain for clean energy technologies. More than 90 percent of rare earth mineral processing happens there, as well as more than three-quarters of all battery cell production. Most components of solar and wind power are also dominated by China, though provisions in Mr. Biden’s signature climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, have accelerated U.S. production of late.
American investments in battery supply chains and mineral extraction in Africa and elsewhere will almost certainly remain in place and may grow, experts say. The U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, which has led efforts to counter China’s control of that sector, was founded by the first Trump administration.
Trump’s new team will have to “figure out what are the sectors which are probably so far gone that we’re never going to catch up,” said Mr. Pyatt, who questioned the wisdom of politicizing electric vehicles when the rest of the world has already “cast the die” on committing to transitioning away from fossil fuels.
“The rest of the world is going to keep going and I think our companies that are globally active have figured that out,” Mr. Pyatt said, adding that he hoped those same companies would be bold enough to tell Mr. Trump, “‘Hey, we shouldn’t be walking away from this stuff because this is how we’re going to make money in the future.’”
