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 — now Trump’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 behind Rainbow 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 himself seems 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 the first 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, who made 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 of rubbing 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 been unprofitable for years, was expected 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 a networking social, Burgum and a few dozen others on a VIP List headed to the Governor’s Residence — a multimillion-dollar home built with a mix of public 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 an agenda 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 menu included walleye fish cakes, a beef entree, and peach cobbler “with vanilla bean ice cream and bourbon caramel,” plus wine and beer supplied by Ron Ness, the president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council (NDPC), according to emails Fieldnotes also obtained.
Contacted for comment, Kopseng told DeSmog he was on a private jet, a Cessna Citation CJ4, and referred questions to Stacy Tschider, Rainbow’s CEO.
“Doug Burgum has been a strong advocate for innovation in energy and carbon capture technologies, recognizing their potential for supporting economic growth and reducing emissions,” Tschider told DeSmog in an email. “Rainbow Energy remains committed to advancing projects like the work at Coal Creek Station to incorporate carbon capture as part of a broader strategy to transition to cleaner energy solutions. However, it’s too early to speculate on how Burgum’s appointment might specifically affect Rainbow or other coal projects.”
“We remain confident in the potential of emerging carbon capture technologies, which are grounded in extensive research and real-world testing,” Tschider added. “While challenges exist, Rainbow is working with industry leaders and researchers to ensure these technologies are scalable and effective. Our approach is guided by science and a commitment to balancing energy reliability with environmental responsibility.”
Crypto, Coal, and Carbon Capture
With Coal Creek Station’s long-time customers shifting away from fossil fuels, Rainbow has moved to put its coal plant to use, at least in part, by powering data centers, which can be used for artificial intelligence, cloud computing, or mining cryptocurrency. Asked about cryptocurrency, a Rainbow executive told The Washington Post in 2022 that he “wouldn’t identify it as bitcoin,” but acknowledged plans to add data centers at Coal Creek.
The company has drawn over $42 million in federal funding to study adding carbon storage to Coal Creek. Rainbow Energy says its Coal Creek project would be “the largest post-combustion CCUS project in the world,” referring to carbon capture and utilization storage. The Department of Energy, which is funding the research under the Biden administration’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, expects studying and permit preparation to continue through 2027.
The Coal Creek Station was the 25th largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S., data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for 2023, the most recent available year, shows. Based on permits sought by Rainbow Creek, the Bismark Tribune noted in May that the company is looking to build a data center near the plant.
Carbon capture for Coal Creek Station’s coal operations remains on the drawing board. A federal grant has begun partially funding plans for potential carbon storage at the power plant — but the grant is aimed at “investigating the feasibility” of storing captured carbon at Coal Creek Station, according to a September 2024 fact sheet, and that work is expected to continue through September 2026. Historically, coal plants have struggled to retrofit for carbon capture — and Rainbow has faced criticism for being vague about how it plans to actually capture the carbon it plans to sequester.
Even before the Infrastructure law grant was announced, Burgum touted the project as “a model of clean baseload power for the world,” adding that he was “deeply grateful to Loren Kopseng” and others associated with the buy-out.
The VIP dinner was far from the only time Burgum connected with Rainbow’s executives. “Great to have a productive discussion with the CEOs of MinnKota, Basin, and Rainbow Energy to discuss concerns about federal overreach and its impact on our state’s energy sectors,” he tweeted in March 2024. “North Dakota is fully committed to protecting our baseload power from unlawful regulations.”
During his confirmation hearing with the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, Burgum seemed to use the word “baseload” as a stand-in for coal or other fossil fuels, to the point where he drew pushback from one member of the committee. “I don’t want the word ‘baseload’ to be code for no renewables,” Sen. Angus King, an Independent from Maine, told Burgum.
Burning coal for electrical power in the U.S. peaked the year before the financial crisis of 2008, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a time when Trump himself was airing the sixth season of “The Apprentice.” Coal use in the U.S. has plunged from over a billion short tons in 2007 to just 387 million in 2023 — with more than one-third of the fuel’s decline occurring during Trump’s first term.
During his time as North Dakota’s governor, Burgum actively fought to prevent Coal Creek Station from closing.
Coal Creek burns a form of coal called lignite — and while North Dakota is hardly known as a coal state, it is home to two lignite coal mines that produced over 4 million short tons of coal apiece in 2023 (making them “major” U.S. mines by federal standards).
“Governor Doug Burgum has been a staunch supporter of North Dakota’s coal industry and has worked tirelessly to secure and foster jobs for the more than 12,000 North Dakotans that rely on the industry,” the Lignite Energy Council said in a statement endorsing Burgum’s run against Trump in the Republican presidential primary in 2023.
In addition to Rainbow Energy’s plans, Burgum has also supported Project Tundra, a plan to retrofit North Dakota’s Milton R. Young coal-fired power plant with carbon capture. Project Tundra hit a major setback in December, when TC Energy, the project’s lead contractor, departed without offering a public explanation, according to Inside Climate News.
Rainbow officials have previously acknowledged that carbon capture can be costly. “Another question we always get is, who runs towards fossil fuels?” Tschider, Rainbow’s CEO, said as he presented at the Williston Basin Petroleum Council conference on May 14, 2024, the day before Burgum’s VIP dinner. “We do.”
“Nobody’s talking about building a coal plant. Nobody,” Tschider added. “Any coal plant that is built has to have carbon capture on it, and that can be very, very, very expensive.”
But despite those concerns, Burgum nonetheless talked up the potential for carbon capture at his Interior secretary nomination hearing. “We know that we have the technology to deliver clean coal,” he told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
“It’s reckless for someone who is seeking a cabinet position to throw around fictional solutions to a very real problem,” said Sierra Club legislative director Melinda Pierce in a statement.
“We urge Doug Burgum to move on from his ‘clean coal’ fairytales and get serious about the problems that our communities are facing by helping our nation responsibly transition to clean energy.”
