Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
US Interior Secretary Doug Bergham speaks with Bloomberg's Alex Steele at Sarah Weekend Houston. They discussed the need to keep coal plants open, gas prices down, and the impact of tariffs on energy production.
Mister Secretary, the unleashing of energy of power?
What is that? What does that look like? From the Interior Department?
Well, both from Interior, but also I have an opportunity to wear two hats in this administration as also as the chairman of the National Energy Dominance Council that President Trump created by executive order, which contains most of the members of the Cabinet Vice chair Chris Wright, and I would say what it looks like is it's the unleashing. Is is exactly that? I mean, it's cutting through all
the red tape. We've just come off of four years where the Biden administration had a hole of government attack US energy, and we're trying to turn that ship one hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction and be win at the back of US energy as opposed to a gale force wind in their face.
What do you where are you able to do.
What is your red tape that you can now cut. What can the Department of Energy Interior do to that?
Well, again, going back to the National Energy Dominance Council, part of what President Trump fully understands is with this whole of government attack that the Biden administration had on energy. There was sec rules, there was Army Corps of engineers, there was you know, the weaponizing of certain laws like US Fish and Wildlife's Endangered Species Act. I mean, all
of these things coming from different angles. And so we've got all the cabinet leaders that are on that, on this council to help us unleash it.
And if we're going to.
Put sanctions on an adversary like around, we've got the State Department, the Treasury Department, they're on there.
They'll make sure those are enforced.
We've got Brooke Rollins from USDA because bio fuels plays point this, and of course Chris Wright, our fabulous new Secretary of Energy and all of the things that are going there. And this is not just liquid fuels, this
is also electricity. And part of the reason why President Trump declared a National Energy Emergency on day one is because the decisions to tilt so in favor of unreliable, expensive, intermittent sources for electricity has put our grid at risk at a time when we need to have more electricity to be able to win the AI arms race against China.
That's to unpack there.
So let's go where you took it, which is alternative energy, and one of that is offshore WIN. You've been reviewing offshore WIN in terms of the existing leases that have already been doled out. Are you any closer to deciding if those companies and those projects get.
To keep the leases.
They're all under review and including onshore WIN is also interview, not just offshore, but we're starting with the offshore WIN because of course that's sometimes three times is expensive and part of what our goal here for Americans is to have lower cost, affordable, reliable energy.
Right.
But if the company already has say, power purchase agreements, and they already have their contracts lined up and their permit being lined up, why would you take that away?
Well, I think we again, that's part of the review. We've been instructed by an EO to take a look at all of that. But in some cases, if we've gone so far out of balance in certain of these rtos regional transmission organizations where we've got too much renewable and not enough baseload in that that's part of what's putting the grid at risk, and we've got to make sure that we've got the right balance.
Okay, so when do you think the review will be completed.
We've got an open end on this thing.
We're going to make sure we do a thorough job on reviewing those projects that are underway.
Well we switch them to other forms.
A big part of this is going to be obviously permitting and be able to move the energy, whether or not it's a liquid form, whether or not it's just power. If I'm a company and I'm looking at what the administration is trying to do, what's the confidence level that all of this permitting, legal issues, putting pipes in the ground can be done in four years.
Well, it has to be done sooner than that.
Usually it's like twenty sometimes for a pipeline.
Right, Well, those days have to be over because if you've got a national energy emergency, we've got to figure out a way to actually deliver. In this case, one of the things we got to be able to do is we've got to be able to deliver low cost, clean US natural gas to all.
Corners of the lower forty eight.
I mean, we've got a situation now where we've got New England states that might be gas prices there might be four times higher than Pennsylvania because we can't complete one hundred and twenty four mile pipeline across the state of New York. So again, if you're in a national energy emergency. At the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we were offloading four hundred thousand barrels of oil a
day of thirty Russian heating oil into New England. I mean, eighty percent of the people in the state of Maine and forty percent of the people in New Hampshire are still heating their homes with heating oil. We can do better than that for these citizens. They ought to have the same right and the same access to LNG that someone does in North Dakota, Pennsylvania or Texas. Well.
Yes, and when I talk to any the company, whether it's a pipeline company, an oil company, and gas company, everyone feels uncertain, like they don't know where tariffs are going to land. They don't have clarity on certain policies. They don't have clarity from all the departments, so they don't want to make a decision yet. How can you give them that clarity.
Well, tariff's is a separate bucket.
But part of what we're talking about on building linear infrastructure in this country is really a regulatory well, because.
If I'm going to build a pipeline, I got to get the steal an aluminum.
And that's more expensive.
Yes, but we should also understand the core principles of tariffs. At President Trump, he's been very very consistent, which is if a country has got a high barrier in their country for the importing into their country of US goods, he wants to have reciprocity. And so people can take a look, the United States is not going to be needlessly or without cause putting tariffs on stuff coming to our country unless that other country has also got a
closed market. And also the other thing that President Trump said he's been looking at as he's looking at the trade balances, and one of the ways that a country can level their trade balance with the US is to buy more US energy. And the way we buy more US energy is we build those export tournables, removing of the Biden export van or the pause on export facilities
for LNG. I mean, Chris Wright and I were in Louisiana last Thursday, six thousand American workers in hard hats that wouldn't be working today on an eighteen billion dollar expansion if that permit and that ban had not been reversed. So we're providing all kinds of certainty in this market to people to know that this is a pro business, pro energy, pro USA administration and that we need all forms of energy to help us drive forward.
Yeah, you're being a ventro global and the expansion there in the Gulf Coast. Speaking of though, in terms of oil and gas leases, for example, if workers who actually approve leases are being let go or if feeling Musk is targeting them for doughs.
Does that make your job harder? Well, get those leases done well.
First of all, the has been clarified by the President that each Cabinet sectary is in charge of their downsizing efforts within their agency, and we welcome the support and help of the additional resources of a DOGE team that's digging in and looking really for on the cost side.
So you have had to lay off anybody, we've.
Made a decision. Not had to, but we've made a decision.
I mean there's I mean, obviously we've got a right sized government. It's not it's bad for the interest rate markets, is bad for the world, it's bad for every American, it's bad for future generations. If we think that it's sustainable to spend two trillion dollars more, two thousand billion a years.
Extra is what we spent last year.
So I mean, the vision is we've got to drive revenue up, and we got to drive additional one trillion of revenue, additional one trillion cost savings is the path to a balance budget. Well, the Interior Department, we've got the biggest balance sheet in the world. Five hundred million acres of land, seven hundred million acres of sub service,
two billion acres of offshore acreage. All of that's got revenue possibility, and not just an oil and gas but timber and grazing leases, and the under the Biden administration, the revenue in Interior was on a decline. If this was if Interior was a hedge fund, it would be the largest balance sheet in the world, and we would have the poorest returns of any company in the world. I mean this is this is a turnaround opportunity for
us to drive revenue up. We want to make sure anybody that's involved in getting permits done they need to stay.
People who've been involved in.
Blocking permits are people who've been participating in illegally not holding the required lease auctions that are required by law.
They probably don't need to stay.
Okay, that's good clarity.
So let's pivot just before we let you go to say coal and nuclear and steps to be taken to prolong the life of coal plants and nuclear plants, which clearly, if you're above all energy, you're going to need those.
Where are we in that right now?
Well?
Absolutely, We've got two sources of baseload that have been neglected and sometimes demonized, and that's coal and nuclear. And if there's a coal plant still running in the US, it's among the cleanest in the world. And China last year opened up a hundred gigawatts of new coal. India on a similar track. They understand that we've got billions of people that don't even yet have electricity in China in particular, understands they need baseload to be.
Able to win the AI arms race.
They're also got thirty new their plants under construction and they're spending hundreds of billions of dollars on hydro.
So in the US we've fallen behind on energy production.
Now we've got real demand from people that are willing to pay for and that's the hyperscalers. The five big tech companies have a three hundred billion dollar capex budget.
This is the largest.
Their capex budget is bigger than oil and gas, bigger than automotive, bigger than steel, bigger than any other industry.
And what they want to spend it on is they.
Need electricity to drive that because this is not ANAI data center.
Is not like, oh, we're going to process healthcare claims. I mean that's important work. It's just business back office processing.
In an AI data center, you're actually manufacturing intelligence, and that intelligence now becomes the highest value product we've ever created with electricity since electricity was invented.
So the demand for that is going to be real.
We've gone through decades of almost no demand increase. The entire time that I was in tech, we used one percent of the nation's electricity, even as the tech sector was growing. Because everything was becoming more efficient now we're in a spot where we've got real demand growth. We've got to meet that demand growth, and we've got to meet it with reliable, affordable baseloads.
And that's not even the entering part, the inference part of it, which is going to be even more so. What's the mechanism that you guys can use to keep the coal plant open longer, the nuclear site open longer.
Well, we can.
First we can stop death by regulation, and part of that we can do by taking a close look at the actual legality of some of the rule making that was perpetrated against these these industries. And I think as part of under the National Energy Emergency, which President Trump has declared, we've got to keep every coal plant open, and we've got to and if there have been units had a coal plant that have been shut down, we need to bring those back on, not just when it's zero degrees.
Or twenty below.
I mean, we've had days On the day that President Trump was a NAUGA in the entire PGAM market, which is thirteen states from New York to Virginia, five AM of January twentieth was the highest peak load for the winner zero from solar because it was five am.
It was dark out.
Two percent from wind, seventy percent from fossil fuels, twenty two percent from nuclear.
So if somebody says, hey, we don't need.
Fossil fuels or nuclear, it was providing over ninety percent of the power on that particular day for some of our most populous areas. I mean, the only thing would be running would have been a hospital with a diesel generator if you didn't have based load fossil fuels.
We're not in a period of energy transition.
That is one of the big lives of the climate extremists is energy transition.
We're in a period of energy audition.
We need addition for the billions of people that don't have electricity, We need additions for AI, we need additions in supply to keep the prices down. And if we want to bring manufacturing back to the United States and reindustrialize our nation and not make the mistake that Germany and the UK are making right now deindustrializing with electric electric prices in Germany or triple what they are here in the United States.
And so we're on.
A path under President Trump to reindustrialize the US, bring manufacturing home, bring investment back, and it's working.
Look one point.
Seven trillion dollars of capital flowing back to the US in the last six weeks because they know we're committed to a policy of providing abundant, reliable, low cost energy a TVD.
IF that includes solar and onshore and offshore wind, well, I think that those are We know that offshore wind, for sure, is three times as expensive and it's intermittent.
So if you're trying for reliable and affordable, it wouldn't meet either of those criteria.
US Interior Secretary Doug Bergham speaking with Bloomberg Zalx Steel at Sarawek in Houston,