Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has been at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s effort to make the country energy independent.
Burgum, a former North Dakota governor, software entrepreneur, and venture capitalist, has overseen the administration’s efforts to reopen oil and gas drilling across millions of acres in Alaska, to end a ban on liquefied natural gas exports, and to boost offshore oil production.
As the second Trump administration nears the one-year mark, Burgum sat down with the Washington Free Beacon.
Thomas Catenacci: We’re nearing the end of your first year in office. What were the highlights of 2025?
Burgum: One year ago, there was a ban on building liquefied natural gas export facilities, which seems like a crazy thing.
President Trump’s energy policies, in particular, are part of the reason he’s been able to solve eight conflicts around the world and working on solving another big one with Russia and Ukraine. And it’s essentially following a strategy that says: “Let’s have energy abundance—energy dominance.” You could use those interchangeably, but with energy dominance, we can sell energy to our friends and allies so they can stop buying from our adversaries, [as opposed to] Iran funding 24 terror groups with sales of oil, Russia funding the war against Ukraine with sales of oil and gas. Russia funds a war against the people that are buying from it.
We’re seeing the market share that we’re taking away from Russia with LNG exports from the United States. A year ago, there’s a ban on export facilities. Now, we’re the number one LNG exporter in the world, and we’re going to grow by 33 percent in the next year. All of that growth is driven by President Trump’s policies, and then American capital, ingenuity, and markets. When you mobilize America, great things can happen, and great things can get built quickly. These LNG export facilities are all $10 to $20 billion projects. But the capacity—that’s going to end the war. I mean, we’re literally going to end another war with U.S. energy policies.
President Trump summed up energy dominance, energy abundance by saying, “Drill, baby, drill.” It meant a lot more than that, but that was one of the components. If you just look at that narrow thing, in the fiscal year, we issued more drilling permits than in any year—you have to go back 15 years—and we are just ramping up. This next year, I’m sure, will be another record. And we set all-time oil production records in July this last year, 13.6 million barrels a day, which is remarkable. I mean, a barrel is 42 gallons, and then think about a million of those.
TC: This recent week was 13.9 million barrels.
DB: Yeah, I knew we were going to break the record, and here we are breaking it already. But we’re setting these new records at a scale that, again, lowers the price of everything, because there’s a component of hydrocarbons that are not just in the car you drive, it supports the production of the food that you eat, it’s in the clothes that you wear, and the products that are in everyday use. People get touched in so many ways. They don’t understand how important that is to the economy.
If you lower the price of oil, then you lower the price of everything. Affordability is a key focus of this administration, and President Trump’s energy policies are the tip of the spear in lowering the price of basically everything.
TC: You recently posted [on X] that gas prices in red states tend to be a lot lower than in blue states, such as California, that have restrictive policies and have trouble keeping refiners producing.
DB: As you’ve noted—and I met with them last week—there are two more refiners that are shutting down. California is one of the states. They have more cars than any other state and the majority of those cars use gasoline—the vast majority, more than 90 percent. And they have to import massive amounts of oil, as you’ve noted in your articles. They always talk about, “Oh, with our economy, we’d be the x-largest country.” But they are not energy independent. They are the most energy-dependent state we have.
Based on who they’re importing from, they have basically become a national security risk for the country because you cannot run California without imported oil. And if the oil was made in a place like Iraq that effectively has no EPA, and then you put it on a tanker and you ship it across the world, that’s diesel. If California really cares about the carbon content of what they’re consuming, their goal should be 100 percent domestic oil and gas, because it’s cheaper, smarter, cleaner, produced here, and there aren’t emissions associated with transporting it halfway around the world.
If you care about the environment, you’d want it all developed here. But they’re going the opposite direction. Under Gavin Newsom, they’re increasing their share of imports from foreign nations, which means more ships, which means more risk to the environment.
TC: Speaking of Gavin Newsom, he was just at COP30 in Brazil. I wanted to note two remarks he made about this administration and the president. He said, “President Trump wants to recreate the 19th century” and is “doubling down on stupid.” How would you respond?
DB: He said the 19th century?
TC: Yes.
DB: So we want to make it like the 1800s, apparently. Well, in the 1800s, California was growing, and today, under Gavin Newsom, California is shrinking. It was always one of our fastest-growing states, but now they’re leading the charge in outmigration. They’re heading towards $8-a-gallon gasoline—and that’s just going to continue.
But the real threat to states that are pursuing an ideology that is disconnected from economics or actual benefit to the environment, you know, is they miss out on savings from domestic production. Increased use of natural gas is one of the ways to dramatically reduce emissions. If people really cared about that, they would be fighting to have more gas pipelines instead of blocking them.
The economy is bifurcating. The new economy is going to be driven by AI, and AI requires electricity. There’s a boom that we’re seeing. It’s been compared to—if you want to go back to the 1800s—in the 1800s where the railroads went, that’s where the economy developed. Move up to the 20th century, the interstate highway system, major infrastructure—where the interstate highways went, that affected the size of communities, that affected the cost of transportation and trucking—it really shaped the whole country.
If you take this next wave of capital, it’s going to be driven around AI factories, where you can, for the first time in history, take a kilowatt of electricity and manufacture intelligence. That capital is going to flow to places that have low energy prices and pro-energy policies as opposed to anti-energy policies.
TC: To your point, there was a recent University of Southern California study on the two refinery closures showing that gas could hit $8 a gallon by the end of next year in California.
DB: You know who that hurts? The people who have to commute the farthest. They are the people that are the poorest because they can’t afford to live near where the jobs are. So they have to drive an hour and a half to get there. Then it becomes unaffordable for them to do that. High gas prices are a horrible tax on low-income individuals.
TC: In the past few weeks, there’s been the approval of a gas pipeline in New York, which a year ago people would have thought impossible. Pennsylvania pulled out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. There was a Pew poll that showed there’s more support for offshore drilling, fracking, and coal mining, even among Democrats. That seems like a shift. Is that thanks to the policies of this administration?
DB: I’d say yes. It’s because this administration’s policies are based on common sense. They are based on an understanding of economics and also an understanding of physics. Basic things like when the sun goes down, solar fields produce zero energy. They say, you know, solar is prone to catastrophic failures, and it’s called sunset.
Europe went all in on some of this wind stuff. Then there were public companies and there was a report out that said their earnings are down because there was a wind drought. They had less wind over the last six-month reporting period in Europe than was expected. So they didn’t produce as much electricity, and their earnings were down, and their stock price fell.
Having sources that are dependent on the weather is like having a sticker next to your light switch that says, “may or may not work based on whether the wind is blowing or sun is shining.” That doesn’t work for an AI factory, it doesn’t work for advanced manufacturing, it doesn’t work for hospitals, it doesn’t work for university systems, and it doesn’t work for the government. We need persistent, stable, affordable, reliable, secure sources of energy. That’s how the world works.
The U.K. has a 78-percent tax on North Sea oil on a marginal cost basis. Now, they’re importing electricity from Norway through an undersea cable, which creates a great security risk for that country. Would you put an AI data center in a country where one Russian sub could put a mine on the cable and blow up a third of the electricity for the country? I don’t think you would.
TC: Secretary Burgum, thank you.
