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This week, the world’s most influential fossil-fuels conference, which has been dubbed the “Coachella of oil”, featured an industry displaying outward glee but barely managing to conceal its anxiety.
As recently as last year, sustainability was a major focus at the annual Houston convention, known as CeraWeek, with fossil-fuel companies touting climate plans. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, the industry is undergoing a vibe shift, forgoing talk of the energy transition and instead parroting the president’s focus on energy “dominance”.
The mood at this year’s CeraWeek was at times not only celebratory but also swaggering. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, kicked off the conference on Monday by saying the Trump administration was “unabashedly pursuing a policy of more American energy production”. Days later, as the White House announced an unprecedented series of environmental rollbacks, the interior secretary, Doug Burgum, invoked Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” mantra and claimed White House officials would cut 20 to 30% of US regulations.
Executives who only months ago were touting their sustainability bona fides heaped praise on the administration. Amin Nasser, CEO of the Saudi national oil company, Saudi Aramco, said the shift away from fossil fuels had been “doomed to fail”, while Larry Fink, head of top asset manager BlackRock, wore a silicone bracelet that read “make energy great again”. The ConocoPhillips chief, Ryan Lance, said Trump had “probably the best energy team in the United States we’ve had in decades”, while the Chevron chief, Mike Wirth, shouted out the “well-qualified people in the Trump administration”.
BP, once called a climate leader in the industry, distanced itself from its recent sustainability pledges, calling instead to ramp up US gas output, which already reached record levels under Biden.
“We have a fabulous position here in the Gulf of America,” said its CEO, Murray Auchincloss.
Calls for “energy abundance” featured heavily, especially amid conversations about a coming boom in demand from the burgeoning artificial intelligence industry.
And the theme of abundance carried over to the amenities offered, too.
The price of admission, which topped $10,000, included daily charcuterie spreads and access to unlimited bubble tea. Burgum’s speech was at a luncheon featuring a three-course plated meal. Wine flowed from open bars at nightly receptions and parties like gas from the nearby shale fields of Texas. (One notable shindig, thrown by the oil and gas companies Williams and EQT, was a 1990s-themed and featured a live band. Its name: “Nothin’ But a Gas Thang.”)
Not everyone in Houston was pleased about the state of the US energy industry, however. On the first day of CeraWeek, hundreds of activists from across the country held a protest, marking the largest disruption in the conference’s history.
As demonstrators marched toward the conference, chanting “we need clean air, not another billionaire”, police on horseback surrounded them, arresting eight people.
“This year’s CeraWeek demanded a protest of this kind,” said Shiv Srivastava of Houston-based environmental justice organization Fenceline Watch. “Look at how the industry is acting under Trump.”
Beneath the bravado inside the conference, however, some showed signs of worry about the energy sector’s fate under Trump. The president’s threats of tariffs, some noted, were creating uncertainty in the business environment and clouding the outlook for fuel prices. The president of the Malaysian oil company Petronas bemoaned policy “pendulum swings” between administrations, while others noted Trump’s executive orders would create confusion as they are challenged in the courts.
“Regulatory uncertainty can be even worse than too much regulation,” said the right-leaning policy researcher Adam J White at a Wednesday roundtable.
Even Trump’s biggest backers called for stability. Vicki Hollub, chief executive of Occidental, who donated hundreds of thousands to Trump, lamented the uncertain future of a controversial tax credit for carbon capture. The incentive was part of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, which Trump has pledged to decimate.
Heads at Chevron, which donated to Trump’s inauguration fund, also worried. Though he gushed over the administration, when asked what he would like to see from policy, CEO Wirth said simply: “Durability.”
“Swinging from one extreme to the other is not the right policy approach,” he said, calling for executive orders to be turned into legislation. It’s a view company heads reportedly expressed to administration officials at a private meeting ahead of the conference.
Others expressed concern that Trump’s calls to increase oil and gas production will push down prices, thereby limiting profit. At CeraWeek, energy secretary Wright expressed confidence that the industry can innovate its way out of that dilemma, but the Texas oil billionaire Harold Hamm, a major Trump donor, pushed back on that idea.
“When you get down to that $50 oil that you talked about, then you’re below the point where you’re going to ‘drill, baby, drill,’” he told Bloomberg.
Despite these uncertainties, CeraWeek made one thing clear: the US is nowhere close to curbing fossil fuel production – something top climate experts have long warned is urgent to avert climate breakdown. Instead, Wright said global warming was merely a needed “side-effect” of modernization, while Burgum called to “take our natural resources and turn them into natural assets”.
This attitude will have major climate consequences, said Melissa Aroncyzk, a media studies and climate expert at Rutgers University.
The administration, she said, will “soon find that it’s not possible to ‘dominate’ the environment without making the American public suffer the consequences”.
