Axios House: Trump team eyes oil and gas diplomacy at Climate Week

NEW YORK – The Trump administration is putting oil and gas deals front and center at Climate Week and the UN General Assembly, a senior White House official said at Axios House on Monday.

Why it matters: The White House is focusing on natural gas by making it a strategic asset in global power politics.

• Axios' Mike Allen and Amy Harder hosted conversations with Jarrod Agen, executive director of the White House National Energy Dominance Council; Federal Energy Regulatory Commission former chair Neil Chatterjee; and Form Energy co-founder and CEO Mateo Jaramillo. The event was sponsored by GE Vernova.

What they're saying: ​​"We are abundant in natural gas here and it is a huge leverage point we have," Agen said.

• Agen stressed that countries are looking to strike deals to stop depending on Russian oil: "It's Europe, it's Asia. They are looking for U.S. energy. They want to get off of Russian energy sources, and we have such a supply."

While many in the sustainability industry disagree with the use of fossil fuels, Chatterjee believes AI is going to "snap us out" of the decades-long fossil fuel versus clean energy debate.

• "AI and the national security implications of AI will be the thing that finally breaks us out of our probably two decades long sort of antiquated fight that we've had to where if you're for fossil fuels, you're of the political right, and if you're for clean energy and climate solutions, you're of the political left," Chatterjee said.
• "For the political left, there has to be a recognition that in order to win the AI race and keep energy affordable and reliable, we cannot do it without fossil fuels."
• "For the political right, I think there has to be a recognition that we cannot possibly do this with fossil fuels alone."

By the numbers: Rising energy costs are a challenge leaders across the spectrum are trying to solve, and Jaramillo says long-term storage could be one of the keys to driving costs down.

• "We expect that this will be a sort of a dampener effect on prices," Jaramillo said. "You're utilizing the assets you already have more efficiently, more effectively, and you don't have to go overbuild in the future to get the same result, and so it sort of has a deflationary effect on the system overall."

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In a View From the Top conversation, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik called nuclear power a breakthrough technology that's "moving very rapidly" because of its power density.

• "Land is going to become a challenge," Strazik said. "You can take a 300-megawatt small, modular reactor that we're constructing right now, and that one football-field-size solution powers 300,000 homes in the U.S. We're building the first one right now in Ontario, Canada."
• "We have our first application into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to start construction on the first plant in the U.S. that we hope to be there by sometime in '27. … So we're going to need zero-carbon electrons that can run at base load, and nuclear is a good solution for that."