Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Wednesday picked the CEO of one of the largest oil companies operating in his home state of Texas to lead a special advisory committee meant to provide energy advice for him.
Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum, one of the largest shale producers in West Texas, will co-chair the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board. Also chosen was former U.S. Navy submariner Adm. Richard Mies, an energy and defense consultant since he retired in 2002.
Hollub’s company is one of the largest independent oil firms in the country. The company produces half of its oil in the Permian Basin in Texas and New Mexico, a region of the country that has helped make the U.S. the largest oil producer in the world. That fact was touted by Trump in his State of the Union address earlier this month.
Producing and exporting more oil and natural gas worldwide is a key part of Trump’s energy dominance agenda, which Perry is charged with overseeing.
Occidental also operates oil and natural gas facilities in the Middle East and Latin America, and runs both conventional drilling and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, facilities in the United States.
It is also one of the largest producers of carbon dioxide for commercial use in the world. It captures the gas and injects it to extract oil from wells. Carbon dioxide helps release oil from hard-to-reach areas underground, where it is also sequestered.
The process is called enhanced oil recovery, and Hollub’s company has been doing it for decades. It also happens to be a focus of Perry’s all-of-the-above energy strategy to develop carbon capture technology to make coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels competitive in a carbon-constrained world.
Carbon dioxide is one of the leading causes of climate change, but capturing it and using it as a commodity would reduce its impact on global warming.
Adm. Mies, who will co-chair the advisory board with Hollub, runs the Mies Group consulting firm, which specializes in strategic planning and risk assessment on international security, energy, and defense issues.
Perry has focused on cybersecurity, establishing the agency’s first cybersecurity office to coordinate with the energy industry.
Mies headed U.S. Strategic Command and had a 35-year career as a nuclear submariner. He was also on the board of governors at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the board of directors at BWX Technologies, which provides nuclear fuels and weapons components for the Navy, and served on the board of directors for Exelon, the largest nuclear utility in the country.
The board includes Daniel Yergin of IHS Markit consultants, who has been described as “America’s most influential energy pundit” and who will be hosting the CERAWeek energy symposium in Houston next month that Perry is expected to address.
Also on the board are Norman Augustine, retired CEO and chairman of defense giant Lockheed Martin and Pedro Pizarro, president and CEO of utility company Edison International.
