clean coal BS
6 25 belated, bunch of nodes
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desmog
doug Burgum, one of President Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees, held a dinner for fossil fuel CEOs at a private event during the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference, held in Bismarck, ND, from May 14 to 16, 2024, emails obtained by the research group Fieldnotes and shared with DeSmog show.
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 — nowTrump’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 behindRainbow Energy, – a North Dakota company with big “clean coal” plans – was a last-minute addition to Burgum’s table, the documents show.
Reviving ‘Clean Coal’ Claims
“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 himselfseems 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 thefirst 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.”
Burgum did not respond to a request for comment.
During his testimony, Burgum, whomade his fortune in part from running tech companies, alleged that the nation faces a “shortage of electricity” driven by what he called “the AI arms race.”
He also has a history ofrubbing shoulders with coal execs — including, for example, top executives from the owners of North Dakota’s largest coal-fired power plant, Rainbow Energy’s Coal Creek Station. The roughly 45-year-old plant, which had beenunprofitable for years, wasexpected to be shut down by the end of 2022 — before the privately owned Rainbow stepped in. Rainbow has big plans to build data centers at its coal power plant and has called carbon capture “vital” to its plans for the coal plant (vital, at least, for Rainbow’s funders).
Dining at the Governor’s Residence
On May 15, while attendees at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference were at anetworking social, Burgum and a few dozen others on aVIP List headed tothe Governor’s Residence — a multimillion-dollar home built with a mix ofpublic and private funding — for the dinner. Burgum was slated to offer “host remarks,” and then Hamm, Wright, and others were to offer comments to the full group, according to anagenda circulated with the invitation, obtained by Fieldnotes via an open records request
The small handful of fossil fuel executives joined Burgum at the head table of the May 2024 dinner, where the menuincluded walleye fish cakes, a beef entree, and peach cobbler “with vanilla bean ice cream and bourbon caramel,” plus wine and beersupplied by Ron Ness, the president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council (NDPC), according to emails Fieldnotes also obtained....