Our New Interior Secy Pimps "Clean Coal", Hosted Oil/Gas/Coal Execs At Governor's Mansion In ND Last Spring
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During his Secretary of the Interior Senate confirmation hearing on January 16 before the Committee on Natural Resources, Burgum’s favorable stance towards fossil fuel energy and his skepticism about renewable energy was on display – with the former North Dakota governor suggesting that renewable energy storage wasn’t quite ready for game time, while also talking up the potential for “clean coal.” That’s disconnected from the current state of the U.S. electrical grid, where over 13,700 megawatts of energy storage like batteries, often paired with wind or solar, were already deployed by the end of last year. Meanwhile, the only commercial coal power plant to use carbon capture, Petro Nova, can supply up to about 240 megawatts when it’s up and running, but the carbon capture project spent much of the past half-decade offline.
But Burgum is no stranger to advocates for carbon capture. At his May 2024 dinner, the then-North Dakota governor was seated with Harold Hamm, the oil tycoon and CEO of Continental Resources, and Liberty Energy’s Chris Wright — now Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Energy. Todd Slawson, chair of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, and Danny Brown, CEO of Chord Energy, one of the Bakken shale’s largest oil producers, were also assigned seats near Burgum. Loren Kopseng, one of the men behind Rainbow Energy, – a North Dakota company with big “clean coal” plans – was a last-minute addition to Burgum’s table, the documents show. “We have an opportunity to decarbonize, produce clean coal, and with that produce reliable baseload [electrical power] for this country,” Burgum testified at his Senate confirmation hearing.
Burgum’s mention of “clean coal” was striking in part because Trump himself seems to have moved on from talking about coal — any kind of coal. The heavily polluting fossil fuel’s use has slumped dramatically over the past decade and a half, sinking to less than 15 percent of America’s power supply in the first 10 months of 2024 (a smaller share than either renewable energy or nuclear power). Burgum’s repeated “clean coal” references drew immediate fire from energy watchdogs, who say there’s a good reason the term has fallen out of favor. “Industry has been talking about ‘clean coal’ for more than a quarter century with no action — because the technology is insanely expensive and it doesn’t work,” Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program, said in a statement in response to Burgum’s testimony. “Make no mistake: When Burgum talks about ‘clean coal,’ he’s really pushing to revive dirty, old, expensive, and climate-destroying coal power plants to power AI.”
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“Governor Doug Burgum has been a staunch supporter of North Dakota’s coal industry and has worked tirelessly to secure and foster jobs for the more than 12,000 North Dakotans that rely on the industry,” the Lignite Energy Council said in a statement endorsing Burgum’s run against Trump in the Republican presidential primary in 2023. In addition to Rainbow Energy’s plans, Burgum has also supported Project Tundra, a plan to retrofit North Dakota’s Milton R. Young coal-fired power plant with carbon capture. Project Tundra hit a major setback in December, when TC Energy, the project’s lead contractor, departed without offering a public explanation, according to Inside Climate News.
Rainbow officials have previously acknowledged that carbon capture can be costly. “Another question we always get is, who runs towards fossil fuels?” Tschider, Rainbow’s CEO, said as he presented at the Williston Basin Petroleum Council conference on May 14, 2024, the day before Burgum’s VIP dinner. “We do.” “Nobody’s talking about building a coal plant. Nobody,” Tschider added. “Any coal plant that is built has to have carbon capture on it, and that can be very, very, very expensive.”
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https://www.desmog.com/2025/01/27/trump-interior-nominee-doug-burgum-hosted-vip-dinner-for-oil-gas-and-coal-execs-last-year-emails-show/