US Energy Secretary Chris Wright: It will take ‘many months’ to get back to normal after this energy crisis

Chris Wright:

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for being here at this fabulous Atlantic Council event. Energy is the most important industry in the world. And I can say that without qualification and without any reservation, because every other industry—whether it’s artificial intelligence, or manufacturing, or your Little League baseball team—every other activity is enabled by energy. Without energy, all the other industries are impossible. So the quality of the energy system, the affordability of the energy system in your country, in your state, in your region, it’s what enables or sets limits on the economic activity and the quality of life possible. So energy is just central.

The previous administration, the Biden administration, didn’t get this. They thought energy was some necessary evil that they wanted to constrain and shrink, and hopefully eventually shrink globally. That, to me, is just to totally miss the boat. A billion people live fulsomely energized lives, like all of us in this room. It’s awesome. We love the modern world. Seven billion people, they want to live the lives we live—fly around the world to conferences and events, and wear fancy clothes, and always be in climate-controlled rooms. That’s pretty awesome. Seven billion other people want what we have. And God bless them, they should and they will achieve that.

But the only road from here to there is massively more energy. We need to take energy for what it is. It is life. It is the enabler of our lifestyles, of our businesses, of our futures. The Trump administration was all in on that, and in the campaign all in on, what is the answer? The answer is more energy—more abundant energy. And what does energy dominance mean, in President Trump’s terms? Energy dominance means that we grow our energy production, of all forms, that make economic sense in the United States so we can better energize our country, reshore manufacturing here, and have so much energy we can also export energy to our friends and allies abroad, and contribute to a larger, more robust global energy system.

Fortunately, that’s gone strikingly well. United States oil production, natural gas production, all-time highs by a fair margin. If we look at the oil export data in May, now obviously May, last month, that’s a different month. We’re in the middle of a—we’re in the middle of a conflict right now, that I’m sure we’ll talk about more. But last month, the number one oil exporter in the world, at 5.4 million barrels a day, was the United States. Russia and Saudi Arabia at four and a little under four million barrels a day. Imagine a world today where the US was still a big oil importer. Like, it would—the world would be just unrecognizably different than it is today.

This is important, because I’ve yet to meet anyone in my travels abroad in the United States—I was just in Capitol—was just at the Capitol building, meeting with representatives and senators. I’ve never met anyone who’s comfortable with this Iranian regime with nuclear weapons. No one thinks that’s a good idea. In fact, we all know that’s a horrific idea. Forty-seven years, they’ve terrorized that region and caused trouble. They’ve threatened global energy supplies. They’ve threatened peace and stability, and certainly economic prosperity, not just in the Middle East but globally. So this is an essential issue that we are addressing right now. And we will continue to address that issue. But, fortunately, the United States is in a position to do that. And despite some of the news we hear, I think things are actually trending in a very positive direction, a very positive direction.

Last two things I’ll say. United States today, by far and away the world’s largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and growing rapidly. Growing rapidly. Natural gas, by the way, if you look at the last sixteen, seventeen years, fastest-growing energy source on the planet, if you look in absolute terms. Not percentage growth terms. Those don’t—those don’t—those don’t really mean much. What means much is growing new energy—net new energy to the world to lift economies, people, lives, and opportunities up.

Last thing I’ll say before we bring Brian Sullivan onto the stage is, five days ago, I think, if I can do—yeah. June 4th, we had the first non-light water nuclear reactor go critical in the United States in over forty years. So our efforts on the nuclear renaissance, some people think they’re over ambitious or they’re not really going to happen. They are happening. Five days ago we had a next-generation nuclear reactor go critical. We believe we’ll have a couple more go before July 4th of this year. And we have ten in progress likely in the next twelve months, all right? So we are going to launch next-generation nuclear technology in the United States. And we’re also going to stand back up the capacity to build large nuclear reactors. And all of this is part of an energy abundance, energy addition agenda.

So we’ll bring Brian Sullivan on. We’ll talk more about energy. We can talk about the crisis going on in the world today. But to make progress for ourselves, for our families, and for next generations, we need to continue to grow our energy system in the United States and around the world.

Brian, come on up.

Brian Sullivan:

Normally I do the introducing. So I’m honored.

I didn’t realize we were in the blame the media part of the introduction. I’m part of the media.

Mr. Secretary, it’s a real pleasure to see you again. Thank you.

Tough to follow up on the amazing discussion between Shaikh Nawaf and my good friend Helima Croft. That was really important and timely.

So awesome, as always, Helima. Thank you.

Thanks for everybody for coming. Let’s give her a big hand.

And it was so timely because the headlines today—the top story on CNBC right now is, obviously, about the president hopeful speaking last night about oil flows, Iran, a deal, the entire world.

And not everybody’s been negative. I want to be clear. There have been some people that have been a little more optimistic about ship oil flows.

I know there’s things you can’t talk about, Mr. Secretary, but can you give us an indication of where ship traffic through the strait—not just kind of around in the Gulf, through the strait is today relative to, say, a week ago or two weeks ago?

Chris Wright:

Rising.

Brian Sullivan:

Well, thanks for coming.

Rising a lot?

Chris Wright:

Yeah, I would say rising very meaningfully.

Brian Sullivan:

OK.

Chris Wright:

Very meaningfully.

Brian Sullivan:

It’s sensitive. I understand that.

But the entire world is watching these flows and the questions that we get on CNBC, that I get personally, often, by the way, from people in this audience, people that are working at major oil and gas companies, is why isn’t oil at $125 a barrel when we had the greatest supply shock in fifty years, if not ever?

What’s the answer to that?

Chris Wright:

I think there’s multiple parts to it. One, there’s been offsetting factors.

You know, right at the beginning the United States coordinated with thirty other nations to release oil into the marketplace. That’s what a strategic petroleum reserve is for. It’s not for managing prices or helping election results.

It’s if you have interruptions of flow of crude, then we release flows of crude and we announce what we’re going to do. And by the way, in our releases we’ve not sold a single barrel. We swap barrels.

We deliver oil today in exchange for more—in exchange for more barrels later than we’re swapping. We’ve already added 35 million barrels to the United States strategic petroleum reserves in these transactions, meaning we’ll have well more oil after this than we had going into this crisis.

So there’s been releases globally from the strategic petroleum reserve. We’ve seen increases in production in the United States and everywhere else that could raise oil production.

We’ve seen, and maybe dramatically, recently China’s oil imports last month were four million barrels a day, roughly, a third of the global—of the whole from this crisis lower than they were before the crisis.

Brian Sullivan:

Do you think that’s permanent demand destruction for China or is it relative to their inventory levels over a billion barrels in storage?

Chris Wright:

Oh, choice B. There’s no such thing as four million barrels a day of permanent demand destruction for oil. No oil, no modern world.

So no, that’s not demand destruction in China. That’s stopping the—they were building a strategic petroleum reserve. Now they’ve stopped building. They’re releasing some from their reserves. They have turned down their refineries so they are producing less products and they are crimping economic activity.

But that’s in response to a crisis. That’s not a permanent change in what’s going on. There has been—there has been price-driven demand destruction particularly in lower income and lower middle income countries that have reduced economic activity or reduced the use of oil in response to the price signal.

But I—but I agree with your assessment that you would—we would have guessed that oil prices would be higher today than they are, given the magnitude of destruction. But an abundance agenda—and not just in the United States. I would say with a lot of our partners in the Middle East as we re-embrace them as not your pariahs that you’ve got to stop this addictive habit you’re doing but that we want to work with you.

We want your capacity to grow. We want to work as partners to energize the world. I think we’ve had great, great success there. So the world had a lot of extra oil inventory in the system when this crisis started.

Brian Sullivan:

More than we—more than we thought?

Chris Wright:

More than we thought.

Brian Sullivan:

Because I think it’s fair to say that many in the oil market—not everybody—but many in the oil market have been a little bit surprised by what appears to be kind of a sanguine reaction. I mean, we’re at ninety. I’m not saying ninety is nothing. Ninety is a lot higher than it was a year ago, Mr. Secretary, as you know. But it’s not 125. It’s not 150. And those arguments can be very easily made about why we should be at 125.

Chris Wright:

I think there was also a belief or an understanding that we had a plan for this crisis. This crisis is about—really about one thing. I mean, it’s about Iranian regime cannot have—cannot have a nuclear weapon. And, of course, we’ve also degraded their ability to build—to build missiles, to build drones, to build other weapons. This isn’t a regime that has just invested all of its earnings not in its people, not in prosperity, not in diversifying its economy, but in making a massive armament system so it can threaten its neighbors and threaten global energy supplies. You could see uniformity in the region and around the world about who’s the greatest threat to global peace and security. Who’s the biggest killer of Americans in the last twenty years? It’s Iran.

Brian Sullivan:

I think the oil markets—and, again, I don’t want to—everybody in this room probably is the oil market or energy market, so I should just defer to all of you. But we don’t have that time. The entire oil market is kind of watching what Helima asked Shaikh Nawaf, which is: What are your estimates for the ramping up? Let’s root for peace. We get some lasting peace. I know ship traffic, according to secretary of energy, is rising. I could take that away.

Chris Wright:

Yes, it is.

Brian Sullivan:

How fast can this ramp back up to some semblance of normalcy? That is now the question the markets, I think, are paying attention to.

Chris Wright:

Well, to get to normalcy, to use your term, that takes some time.

Brian Sullivan:

I don’t even know what that means.

Chris Wright:

Ships have been redirected. You know, some supply chains have shifted and been disrupted. So I think it’s many months to get back to normal flows of energy. And, of course, out of the Gulf it’s not just oil and natural gas. You know, there’s a meaningful exports of sulfur, of helium, of lubricants, of other critical products. So we’ve seen how robust a modern economy is that it’s absorbed these blows, not with no impact but with much more modest impact than was expected.

I think the price will be wildly worth paying, because think on the other side of this. If you have an Iran that is not a constant threat to its neighbors, to peace and stability, to investment in the region, and to the flow of energy, think of where we’re going to go beyond this to a world. And look at the expansions in the United States. Alaskan production is growing now. Gulf of America production is growing. Venezuela production is growing. Guyana production is growing. In the Middle East, all of our friends and allies there, including Kuwait, they have meaningful expansion plans going on. We see a very bright, well-supplied energy future in the years and decades to come.

Brian Sullivan:

I wrote last week—I have a new energy intelligence piece every week. By the way, check it out if you can. And I wrote about, I could see fifty-dollar oil in the next year. And here’s why. And tell me if I’m right or wrong, OK? When you look at—because one thing I like about—and one thing I learned from my good friend Helima is it’s all about barrel counting. A lot of oil is just math, right? You’re an MIT guy so this is right up your alley.

When I look at—OPEC+ just raised output. I understand the supply disruptions, but in print they’re raising production. UAE is probably going to go higher. Kuwait with pipelines, once they get back to normal, probably going to go higher. Ghana is going to go higher. I know Venezuela is already higher. In fact, as of last week Venezuela was the number-one importer of—or, the US was the number-one destination for Venezuelan oil. Brazil’s on the rise. Canada can go up. The US is at 13.7 million barrels per day. Demand around the world is going up a little bit, but not as much. Can you make an argument for fifty-dollar oil in a year?

Chris Wright:

Well, I’m careful about price predictions. So I’m not going to go there. But I am going to agree with you that there’s abundant resources being developed. And we’re going to have a well-supplied market in the coming years. But there’s a flip side to that too, a very positive flip side. You have a well-supplied, moderately priced oil prices, that leads to faster economic growth around the world. That is certainly the goal of this administration—abundance, economic growth, new opportunity.

Brian Sullivan:

The late great Boone Pickens would often—he would never give price—would always try to pin him on where is oil going? Brian, I can’t do that. But he would say it’s more likely to go 50 than 150. Is that fair to say?

Chris Wright:

I think that’s fair to say. But they’re both very low likelihood. I’m not predicting where oil prices are going. Brian does. That’s his business.

Brian Sullivan:

No, I’m trying to pin down—

Chris Wright:

What would—what I say—and one of the things you look at is the percent of the wallet that people spend for energy in their life. You know, gasoline, for example.

Brian Sullivan:

Yes.

Chris Wright:

Even today that’s actually not that high in the United States. Oil was meaningfully higher four years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine. There was not any meaningful disturbance in the flow of energy, but there was a belief in the United States we were trying to strangle an industry, and now it had another challenge with a major producer at war. Without an interruption of flows we had oil in nominal terms, and gasoline, much higher than it is today, in nominal terms, in inflation-adjusted terms, just dramatically higher. So it’s the attitude towards energy, the message the United States sends about how we view energy, do we want it to grow or do we want to strangle it, that impacts prices, that impacts investments, that impacts affordability.

Brian Sullivan:

Listen, I’m the nerd that tracks all my gas. I drive to the Midwest every summer. And I paid $5.75 a gallon in June of 2022 in Ohio and Indiana. I know, because I write it down, because I’m that guy. Can you give us an update on where we stand with Venezuela?

Chris Wright:

Yeah. So Venezuela, everything you got to look at of a baseline. Twenty-five years of bad rule, bad governance in Venezuela, destruction of the rule of law, destruction of the energy industry, destruction of people’s life’s opportunities. Eight million people left Venezuela. And for the first time maybe in history, millions of people left, fled a country, and fled to poorer countries elsewhere in South America. That’s the base setting of Venezuela, because, you know, is it—is it Norway today? No. Is it massively improved in a few months? Massively.

Brian Sullivan:

Massively improved, what does that mean?

Chris Wright:

Massively improved.

Brian Sullivan:

There’s infrastructure investments starting?

Chris Wright:

Well, yes. There’s money now going into building the electricity grid up. Oil exports have roughly tripled from December to where we are today. So the biggest industry in the country is growing. There’s investment coming from different countries around the world. Production is growing. But I think a hint of freedom and liberation in this society. The goal of the operation of Venezuela was to remove a major destabilizing force in the Western Hemisphere that impacted us right here in the United States. Almost a million people displaced into our country, and not all of them law-abiding. So we want to—and we want to reduce the drug trade. We want to reduce the barriers to investment, not just in Venezuela, but in its neighbors, in Central America, and South America, and the Western Hemisphere.

Now the talk is about Venezuelans returning to Venezuela, economic growth again, and prosperity then. And, yes, massively increased energy supplies for the world. And of course, most of the US refineries were built in the 60s and 70s. The largest exporter of oil in the 60s and 70s globally was Venezuela. So we built our refineries in mind that this is what a major crude slate is going to look like as far as the eye can see. So that Venezuelan crude is perfectly suited for American refineries, which is why more and more of it’s going into them.

Brian Sullivan:

So you said that oil exports have tripled since December from Venezuela?

Chris Wright:

Correct.

Brian Sullivan:

And the investment—listen, I know, like, I guess I’ll break some news to the audience, I know private equity funds that are down there now that are either investing money or looking to invest money in Venezuela. Can you confirm that there are Americans—is American capital in country, in Venezuela, looking to invest on the energy story?

Chris Wright:

Absolutely. Happening today. Yes. Many people are looking that are new, incumbents that were there already have grown their investments in Venezuela, and are growing their production quite rapidly. That’s to the benefit of Americans, to the global energy system, and to the benefit of Venezuelans.

Brian Sullivan:

So we were both just in California, my original home state. And I love California. California now relies more on imported oil than any time in its history. It’s hard to believe, but if it wasn’t for Iraqi oil, Algerian oil, Libyan oil, California might have shortages. There are giant ships sitting off the coast of L.A. and San Francisco filled with Middle Eastern oil that came around Argentina, because they’re too big to go through the Panama Canal. The suspension of the Jones Act has been a big deal.

And the Jones Act, for those of you that may not be familiar, was a hundred-year-old law to protect shipbuilding in America, where basically a US ship—you have to—if you’re going to ship from Houston to LA, you’ve got to use a US ship. But we know now there’s almost no US ships. So you got to literally take a ship from Houston to, like, Barbados, switch the oil, and then bring it back to Los Angeles. I think we can all agree the technical term for that is stupid. Is the Jones Act going to be repealed permanently? Would you do it if you could?

Chris Wright:

Well, let me—let me say—I don’t want to get in front of any politicians there, but –

Brian Sullivan:

There’s a few around.

Chris Wright:

Yeah, there’s a few around. But, of course, it has been enormously helpful to remove—to suspend the Jones Act temporarily. There’s been gigantic ship traffic, as you just said, from the US Gulf Coast, where we have products, to California, the West Coast, up the East Coast as well. Enormously helpful in a time of shortages. And California is a greater, broader story that you and I have spoken about before. It’s sort of the previous administration energy policy. We don’t like the energy industry. We want to strangle it. We want to demonize it. In fact, Gavin Newsom has called me, as I’ve celebrated the growth of our oil and gas production, I’m bringing us back to the Stone Age. You know, and he’s modern and cutting edge.

The United States gets almost 74 percent of our energy just from two things—oil and gas. They just dominate the American energy system. In California, it’s even greater. Over 75 percent of all the energy consumed in California comes from two things, oil and natural gas. Yet they’ve done everything possible—they used to produce 40 percent of American oil. Forty percent. Today they produce less than 2 percent of American oil. But yet, their economy, their state runs on oil and gas to a larger percent than ever before. So all they’ve done is said, well, we’re not going to use our own oil and gas, and we’re not going to use that stuff from Texas or Louisiana either because we don’t want to build pipelines or infrastructure.

Brian Sullivan:

Well, they’re going to have—are pipelines going to be built? Because there’s people actively looking into building pipelines from Houston and St. Louis to California right now.

Chris Wright:

Absolutely. Absolutely. The largest supplier of crude to California before this conflict was Iraq. Now, I love Iraq. And they got a great energy system. But does that make any sense, with the United States a massive net exporter of oil? California, almost two-thirds of the oil they consume comes in from overseas, right? And what’s the benefit they get? Well, they get to pay $1.50 a gallon more than everybody else on average in the United States does. They did the same thing with their electricity grid. They pay massively higher electricity prices than Americans as a whole. And what’s the biggest source of electricity in California? Natural gas. What’s the second-biggest source of electricity in California? Imported from other states. Which means coal, gas, and hydro.

Brian Sullivan:

I think the previous governor’s father was a natural gas importer, to be honest with you. Jerry Brown. I believe—if my history—somebody can correct my history.

Chris Wright:

So my point there is to be honest and to be pro-energy and pro-humans is to be the opposite of the governance in California. That’s what this administration is about. I don’t know why that’s—thank you.

Brian Sullivan:

All the Arizonans and the Nevadans in the crowd are applauding.

Chris Wright:

To impoverish your citizens and strangle the most important industry in the world, like, where’s the—where’s the virtue? Where’s the win in that? Where’s the win?

Brian Sullivan:

You have many college degrees. One of them, I believe, is from Berkeley. You’re sort of an honorary Californian. I was born there. The first house my parents bought in Torrance was, like, three blocks from a refinery. My dad owned a gas station in Los Angeles when I was a kid. I remember 1979-1980, for some reason I was working at nine years old. Child labor laws, what happened? And there was no gas. And there was—this is a true story. There were men who would get into fistfights because their cars were empty, but they didn’t have the right license plate, right? And my dad would, like, have, like, a bat, and he’d be, like, stop fighting, because these guys would get into fistfights. Like, I’m next. They would cut the line.

And we’re running out of time. I want to ask you about—you said the electricity grid. There’s this thing called AI. Has anybody heard of this AI, artificial—it’s kind of a big deal. It’s actually powering the entire stock market, from what I’m told. Is there an argument, and I think the president has said this, that the US should take investments in datacenter companies or hyperscalers, like Google—should the United States actively take a stake in some of these companies?

Chris Wright:

Well, look, I’m not going—I’m not going to go there either. I’m a capitalist, as you know, but what—our focus is how do we help the energy system catch up, the electricity system, so we don’t slow the progress of AI.

In the last twenty years the United States has tripled our oil production and doubled our natural gas production and barely grown our electricity production. In China, it’s the opposite.

But, like, why is that? We can’t grow electricity production in the United States?

That’s this bad governance at federal levels and state levels that’s made it so hard to develop new electricity generation. So my focus is fixing that problem so we can grow our electricity production as fast as we can grow our primary energy production so we can reshore American industry here and we can make sure the United States, not China, leads in AI. This is important for national security.

On the security side, it’s important for economic security and it’s going to bring, of course, enormous innovation. We’re all going to live longer lives. Diseases that would have killed us if we got diagnosed with them two years ago, if you get diagnosed with them five years from now we’re going to have treatments for those.

It is going to change our lives massively. It’s unsettling to some, and I get that. There’s going to be disruption. But the benefits are going to be massively larger than the downsides.

Brian Sullivan:

Let me ask it a different way, and I understand you’re not an elected official from Virginia or Indiana or Texas.

That said, all the datacenter fights, right? Like, well, the grid’s going to be overtaxed. Water usage, which is interesting because most have a closed loop on water but that’s a different issue.

Should—would you—would you support if you had the—just sort of the power, should the hyperscalers, should the datacenter builders, datacenter users, should they pay their own way?

Chris Wright:

Yes.

Brian Sullivan:

Should they invest in local grids?

Chris Wright:

Of course. Of course, and they are. That’s the Trump administration ratepayer protection pledge, and the hyperscalers embraced it. We didn’t twist arms. They embraced it.

They get that they need electricity. They need it fast. They understand the public has fears and concerns about them. They are today and they will even more in the future lean in. If you look at the states where there’s datacenter development or demand development of any kind, those are the states that have not had rapidly rising electricity prices.

The states with the fastest rise in electricity prices are also the most expensive states, the New Yorks, the Massachusetts, Maryland, California, Delaware. Those are all states that produce less electricity today than they did five or ten years ago.

Demand growth is the mechanism to bring prices down. The states that have gone the wrong direction on electricity are not where datacenters are being developed.

Brian Sullivan:

Where do they get the demand? Natural gas? Nuclear? Small modular—where do we stand with—I heard you mention nuclear in your opening remarks. Where do we stand with that?

Chris Wright:

Well, nuclear is the second biggest source of electricity in the United States after natural gas. It’s not growing yet but it will be growing in the next few years. The fuel that will drive datacenters and us leading in AI is natural gas.

We want everything. We’re for next-generation geothermal. We are bringing back on retired nuclear plants. We are expanding capacity of existing nuclear plants. We have stopped the silly closing of coal plants, the world’s largest source of global electricity for 125 years and will be for decades more.

We’re just bringing common sense back. But the thing we can grow rapidly for 24/7 reliable firm electricity today is natural gas. That will be the biggest new source of electricity to power AI and reindustrialization.

Brian Sullivan:

But they—but the rate protection pledge, which I know you guys talked about—we talked about it a couple of months ago.

Chris Wright:

Yeah.

Brian Sullivan:

These hyperscalers, because there’s a huge local pushback, state pushbacks too, some federal pushbacks. There’s a building called the Capitol. It’s about a mile that way, and there’s some pretty important people in that building that are pretty active saying no more datacenter construction. End the datacenter construction because of water use and electricity use.

If the Googles, the Amazons, the Microsofts, not mentioning one company—they’re all of them—if they were to say, we’re going to pay to fix the grid up. Don’t worry, we got it. We’re going to bring in the water. We’re not going to take anything from the people—is that how it should be?

Chris Wright:

That’s what’s happening. Absolutely, that’s what’s happening. This is very parallel to the start of the shale revolution.

You know, if you looked back—technically I would say it started twenty-five, twenty-eight years ago. Everyone learned about it maybe fifteen years ago, and the same people were out there saying it was going to pollute the water. It was going to cause earthquakes. It was going to ruin the planet for climate change. It’s easy to scare people. It’s hard to rationally educate people about positive tradeoffs.

But yes, the movement to scare people about AI and datacenters is in the lead right now. It will lose, as it did in scaring people about nuclear, as it did in the climate alarmism, as it did in saying we should never open our schools again with COVID.

Look, there is a professional scare people class. They are well-funded. They do get overseas money, but there’s a huge domestic constituency for that as well. And they have an easier sell, but they’re wrong. They’re wrong.

Brian Sullivan:

I’m going to wrap it up with this, kind of going back to how we started because it is, again, our—I think it’s—the oil price movement is moving the stock market. So that’s what I do for a living. On CNBC, we talk about the economy and equities and money. Leave us with a reason to be—to be optimistic about Iran and what’s going to happen.

Chris Wright:

Yeah. Look, every—Iran has essentially zero people on their side. Who believes in economic terrorism, you know? We’ve built up, like, a massive arms complex. We’ve attacked all of our neighbors and allies. And that isn’t enough, so we’re going to stop the flow of energy to everyone in the world. Like, that’s not going to prevail. And they’re going to get to play that card once, and they’ve played it. This will not happen again. Both we’ll see infrastructure away from that and you’re going to see defense advances, right? There’s new—Iran has a bunch of new cheap weapons that we will have before long ways to easily defeat them. But today it’s been more of a struggle than we would like, but that solution will end with an Iran without nuclear weapons and with free flow of energy.

That’s where we’re ending for sure. I’ve said that from the start. The question is the route and the pathway there. But that’s not just a short term; that’s a long term. Iran’s threat and problem to the world will be massively reduced. The world is going to be well-energized. We have awesome technology advancements going on right now. And we’re going to reindustrialize the United States of America and bring back energy and pro-human commonsense to the planet. I am massively optimistic for the US economy in the next couple years and for the global economy in the coming decades.

Brian Sullivan:

I want to end it there, but I got to—I got to say this because part of this will air on my—on CNBC today in my 2:00 p.m. ET show. The headline could be that US—that oil exports from the Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz are rising. That’s a fair statement?

Chris Wright:

That is a fair statement. And will continue to rise.

Brian Sullivan:

Secretary of Energy Christopher Wright, really appreciate your time, sir.

Chris Wright:

Thank you, Brian. Thank you all. Thank you.

Brian Sullivan:

Thank you. Thank you again. That was awesome. Thank you.