The Surprising Climate Commitments of Trump’s New ‘energy Czar’

Former North Dakota governor Doug Burgum, an outspoken proponent of carbon capture, committed to making his state carbon neutral by 2030.

As the governor of a major oil-producing state, Doug Burgum emerged as a staunch champion of the fossil fuel industry. Yet he promised to make his state carbon neutral, by preventing climate-warming gases from reaching the atmosphere.

Now, for his next act, the former North Dakota governor is set to become Donald Trump’s interior secretary and “energy czar,” a key figure in enacting the president-elect’s “drill, baby, drill” energy agenda.

Burgum, who will oversee how much oil, gas and coal the United States extracts from public lands and waters over the next four years, embraces the bold and controversial idea that we can capture much of the planet-warming pollution from that activity. If the country follows Burgum’s lead, it will embark on a massive climate experiment — one with his home state at the center of it.

“This is a great opportunity to leverage one of the world’s challenges for the benefit of our entire state,” said Burgum of carbon capture when announcing a plan to make North Dakota carbon neutral by the end of the decade.

The Senate Energy Committee will take up Burgum’s nomination for interior secretary on Jan. 14.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks with, from left, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum and Sen. Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) at a campaign rally last January in Laconia, New Hampshire. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

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Both in and outside the state, the oil and gas industry has embraced the technology, which involves catching the greenhouse gas before it reaches the atmosphere and pumping it underground to store indefinitely, as a way of staying in business in a low-carbon world. The Inflation Reduction Act, President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, included generous tax credits to incentivize carbon sequestration.

But critics across the political spectrum — including some fellow Republicans who will also serve alongside Burgum in the next Trump administration — have called the technology an untested and unnecessary boondoggle.

For some climate activists, carbon capture is a ruse by the fossil fuel sector to forestall the much-needed transition to renewable energy and allow oil companies in some cases to inject carbon dioxide underground to help extract even more petroleum. For others, pumping carbon dioxide underground is a threat to the property rights of farmers, ranchers and other landowners.

“We don’t need to be a dumping ground for everybody’s carbon,” said Scott Skokos, executive director of the Dakota Resource Council, a conservation and farming group that opposes several carbon-capture projects in the state. “Ultimately, all that carbon is going to be stored underneath a bunch of different farms and you just never know in 20, 30, 40 years if those storage wells are going to hold up or not.”

Now Burgum and his new boss must decide whether to embrace or shun the low-carbon tech that the oil industry loves.

The Carbon-Neutral Republican

A former software start-up CEO and Microsoft executive, Burgum won the governor’s office in 2016 on the same antiestablishment wave that propelled Trump to the White House.

Before taking office, Burgum had little knowledge of the oil and gas sector and was not the industry’s first choice for the job in the GOP primary. Burgum even criticized his primary opponent for accepting oil and gas donations, suggesting it created a conflict of interest.

“We were supporting his opponent,” said Ron Ness, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, an industry group.

Ness recalled how eager Burgum was to understand the industry that had reshaped his state. North Dakota had been transformed by an oil boom fueled by advances in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, methods capable of unlocking once-inaccessible pockets of petroleum. Today, the state is the country’s third-largest crude oil producer.

“He came to my office with a notebook,” Ness recalled. “I think he was here almost three hours, just learning about energy and grilling me with questions. It was fascinating.”

A gas flare is seen at an oil well outside Williston, North Dakota. (Andrew Burton/Getty Images)

The same geology that harbors that oil and gas also makes North Dakota ideal for sequestering the carbon dioxide produced by hydrocarbon fuels.

“We look for formations that are porous and permeable,” said Charles Gorecki, head of the University of North Dakota’s Energy & Environmental Research Center, which studies carbon capture. “We target these in general for oil production … and those are those same targets then we look for for CO2 storage.”

To spur industry to capture its carbon pollution, Congress in 2018 passed a measure enhancing an existing tax credit for sequestration projects. The measure, sponsored by then-Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-North Dakota) with wide bipartisan support, was signed by Trump as part of a broad budget bill.

In 2021, Burgum set an ambitious goal of making North Dakota carbon neutral by 2030 — not by reducing oil and gas production, but by using North Dakota’s advantageous geology to store carbon dioxide produced around the country. The following year, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping piece of climate legislation that further boosted the tax credit by providing companies up to $180 for each ton of carbon dioxide stored.

Republicans have criticized Biden’s landmark climate bill as wasteful spending. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to “terminate” the Inflation Reduction Act.

Project 2025, a policy blueprint from the Heritage Foundation, calls for eliminating the tax credit. Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican businessman who ran for president in 2024 and whom Trump picked to help run the newly proposed “Department of Government Efficiency,” said it is “indefensible” to use taxpayer dollars on carbon capture.

But Burgum, who also briefly ran for president in 2024, has defended carbon capture as simply good business for his state. “This has nothing to do with climate change,” Burgum said in early March on a North Dakota radio program, as reported by the Associated Press. “This has to do with markets.”

A Business Standpoint

Rhetorically, Burgum has had to walk a fine line. Like many Republicans, he has criticized Biden’s climate policies, including measures to reduce federal acreage for drilling and pause approvals for liquefied natural gas export facilities. But unlike Trump, he has shied away from labeling climate change a “hoax.”

“You don’t have to have an opinion or believe in climate change or not climate change,” Burgum said in a recent speech. “I can’t explain to you why someone would buy organic milk for twice as much as regular milk, but there’s demand for it. There are people that will pay a premium for less carbon-intensive products.”

For Skokos, the North Dakota conservationist, Burgum’s support of carbon capture has more to do with helping business than fighting climate change. “He’s trying to save — I guess the best way to put it would be entrenched interests like coal and oil and gas,” he said.

The Trump transition team declined to make Burgum available for interview.

By the time Burgum ran for president, he was an ally of the petroleum sector, including oil tycoon and Trump fundraiser Harold Hamm. Burgum’s campaign and political action committee received more than $470,000 from the industry, according to OpenSecrets, which tracks political spending.

After suspending his long-shot presidential campaign, Burgum became a key energy adviser to Trump, attending a meeting between Trump and some of the country’s top oil executives at Mar-a-Lago. At the meeting, Trump asked the executives to help steer $1 billion to his 2024 campaign, while promising to reverse dozens of environmental regulations.

If confirmed by the Senate to lead the Interior Department, Burgum will have vast oversight over about 500 million acres of federal land that will be key to the country’s climate and energy future. Trump has also tapped Burgum for a newly created “energy czar” role that does not need Senate confirmation, in which he will lead a newly formed National Energy Council to choreograph Trump’s plans to repeal federal climate rules and encourage energy production.

Although Trump has downplayed climate change’s negative impacts and promised to dismantle Biden’s climate policies, the oil and gas sector has embraced carbon capture with a bear hug. Globally, the technology attracted more than $11 billion in 2023, nearly doubling the investment from the previous year, according to BloombergNEF. McKinsey has predicted carbon removal could be a trillion-dollar industry by 2050. The United States, unable to wean itself off fossil fuels, is leading that charge.

U.N. climate scientists say carbon capture is likely to be central to preventing dangerous levels of warming.

So far, the industry remains optimistic that its allies in Washington will help preserve the federal carbon-capture tax credit, outlined in section 45Q of the U.S. tax code and expanded by the Inflation Reduction Act.

“We’re confident that … there’s going to be support to maintain 45Q,” said Mike Sommers, head of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest lobbying group in Washington. “And I would also say that the industry is unified on the preservation of 45Q.”

Burgum helped turn North Dakota into a carbon-sequestration leader. Under his watch, it became the first state to win the right from the federal government to regulate its own carbon-storage wells.

The North Dakota Industrial Commission, which Burgum chaired as governor, has approved permits for several carbon-capture projects, including an enhanced oil recovery project by ExxonMobil subsidiary XTO Energy. A coal gasification plant recently announced it had sequestered 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

But other carbon-capture projects in the state have hit snags.

Late last year, the Canadian pipeline company TC Energy withdrew from a plan to retrofit a half-century-old coal-fired power plant for carbon capture, dubbed Project Tundra.

An even more contentious project is a plan by Iowa-based Summit Carbon Solutions to pipe carbon from Midwestern ethanol plants to North Dakota for underground storage.

Kurt Swenson, who raises cattle on a family ranch in central North Dakota, considers himself a conservative. He voted for Burgum twice. But he soured on the former governor after Burgum backed the Summit project, which plans to store carbon under his family’s 2,000 acres.

Swenson fears the nascent storage techniques may leak carbon onto his family’s ranch and says the project violates their constitutional rights as property owners. The rupture of a carbon pipeline in Mississippi in 2020, for instance, hospitalized 45 people as residents struggled to breathe.

“The last thing we want to do is to see that land become scarred from an industrial process,” Swenson said. “We really don’t have anything other than models to say it won’t leak.”