Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. Pittsburgh is host to the inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit. The event kicks off today with President Trump set to attend in just a few hours. For a look at the future of US energy and tech, Bloomberg's Tyler Kendo is standing by Tyler, Thanks so much, Ed.
And I'm pleased to say that I'm joined by the US Energy Secretary, Christopher Right. Secretary Right, thank you so much for joining Bloomberg. And I want to start with one of the main reasons why we're here in Pittsburgh. There is this surging demand for energy to help power artificial intelligence, and the administration focuses a lot on its deregulation agenda. Do you think that you can accomplish your goals fast enough to keep up with what has been a surge and energy consumption.
I think we will. You're right, it's a challenge. I mean, the agenda of President Trump is to unleash American energy. The last four years the Biden administration was more to shackle American energy. But you're right, there's rapidly rising demand and what we as the government need to do is enable private businesses to build the things they want to build and invest in the things they want to build.
We're not going to do this building ourselves, but we're going to enable private businesses to do it.
Well, I'm glad that you brought up private businesses and to kind of put a finer point on this idea of urgency. We actually heard from Mark Zuckerberg yesterday pledging billions that Meta is going to invest in data centers, but it is raising concerns about an energy crisis to fuel it. I'm wondering, have you spoken to Zuckerberg or Meta about their plans.
Oh, we speak Meta extensively about their plans, and yeah, there's a number of the hyperscalers that have huge investment opportunities. We're excited about that. This is the newest energy intensive industry to arise. That's what artificial intelligence is, energy intensive industry, taking them sophisticated, most expensive form of energy electricity and turning it into intelligence to transform more world and protect
our nation. So yeah, Meta has huge investment plans, as does Amazon and Microsoft and Google and the other players in that space, and we need all of them will invest. It's a few hundred billion dollars this year. In fact, you'll hear at the conference today announcements it was seventy and I think now ninety billion dollars just in the state of Pennsylvania.
When you hear big investments though, and how much energy that is going to take, what's your level of concern though that there is going to perhaps be such a great demand. Can the US really keep.
Up with it?
Absolutely? You know, United States energy production because of the shale revolution just exploded in the last ten or twelve years. Pennsylvania is a massive energy producer today. Pennsylvania exports more energy out of its state than any other state except for Texas. And Pennsylvania could massively grow its energy production, just doesn't have enough pipeline capacity to move that natural
gas out of the state. So what's going to happen is more that gas or additional gas will be consumed in Pennsylvania, turned into electricity generated intelligence and keep the United States ahead of China in the AI race.
So I want to talk about oil, and I also want to welcome in our audience that has just joined us. We were talking to the US Energy Secretary Christopher Wright. I'm Tyler Kendall. I want to show you some of these statistics that our analysts have, Bloomberg pulled that the US oil rig account has dropped thirteen percent since late February. It's in the midst of its longest contraction since twenty twenty.
I know that there were some incentives in the reconciliation package, but what further incentives is the administration considering to help get forward these oil breaks to continue drilling.
Mostly it's get out of the way. You know, we had the Biden administration had four years all of government approach to try to, as they said, end fossil fuels. Now, that didn't work very well. We went from eighty two percent of American energy coming from fossil fuels before Biden took office to eighty two percent exactly the same when he left office. That those are just simply the energy sources that power our country and our world today. But
it's get out of the way of the marketplace. Right now, US production has grown so fast as has other places in the world, that prices are maybe at the low end of profitability for producers here, so you see a pullback and activity You're going to see with these new investments and economic growth in the United States, We're going to see growth in demand for oil, and of course that'll probably bump prices backed up a little bit, keep drillers active.
Well, you mentioned there perhaps a lower price environment. And part of this also, when we're talking about costs that these companies are facing, has to do with tariffs, and I wanted to ask you about copper in particular, which is essential to data centers and getting energy to help power AI. What sort of impact is a fifty percent copper terraft set to go into effect on August first, going to have when we're talking about the costs for energy infrastructure.
Well, I think the biggest impact of that fifty percent Terrafund coffer is going to speed up copper mining in the United States. We have enormous copper resources here. We have some huge minds that have been trying to get going for years. We want to get copper production growing rapidly in this country. Copper, like steel, is just essential to everything that happens in the world.
Should we expect the energy industry to get some sort of tariff carveout moving forward?
I believe the President plans no special carve outs. He wants to reindustrialize the United States of America. There's a lot of tools to do that make it easy to invest in the United States, make it attractive to invest in the United States, and tariffs are an additional element of that toolbox.
I'm sure you're talking to industry, though. Is a carve out on the table? Are there any negotiations underway for say, the oil industry to get a carve out when it comes to the equipment that they use in the field, like copper or steel, for example.
No discussions right now. We are hearing from the industry, and of course this is true. If you incrementally raise the cost of projects, that hurts the economics of them. We want to do everything we possibly can to maximize investments in the United States so jobs and opportunity come here to our country.
Lastly, I just want to ask you a geopolitical question, because we did hear from President Trump yesterday for a name, one hundred percent so called secondary tariff on countries that import Russian energy supplies. If that were to go into effect, what would that do to prices in the global energy market.
Something like that would likely drive oil prices up. I think President Trump's strong agenda there is to end the war in Ukraine. Our hope is that that large pressure will have an impact on Russia and we can bring just a brutal war in Eastern Europe to an end. That's President Trump's goal is prosperity at home and peace abroad, and the old formulas weren't working very well in that respect. So yeah, President Trump has very different tools, very different
negotiating skills, and very different level of boldness. I think we're going to see tremendous growth in peace abroad and prosperity at home.
All Right, we have to leave it there. US Energy Secretary Christopher Wright, thank you so much for your time. This has been a conversation here in Pittsburgh on the sidelines of the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit.