CLAYSVILLE, Pennsylvania — When Shawn Steffee took to the podium at the Range Resources field office this month, he stood in front of a crowd of over 500 people, including local elected officials, energy workers in the natural gas industry, and luminaries such as the company’s CEO and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
Steffee, the business manager for Boilermakers Local 154 and a local legend in the labor community, said he decided this moment, with Burgum as a captive audience, called for him to speak not from prepared remarks but from the heart.
“We’ve got to use our resources here, and it is natural gas. We also got coal, we also got nuclear, but where else can we get on board as quickly as we need to is natural gas,” he said.
“So, if I could leave you with one thing today, the boilermakers, and labor, is ready to build the infrastructure of tomorrow. We are ready to build the infrastructure of today, and we need reliable baseload electricity, and it is going to come from natural gas. So, if I could leave you with just one thing, everybody stay committed, keep advocating, keep pushing forward. The pendulum has swung in our direction, and it is time to take what has been given to us and move forward,” Steffee said.
The local labor leader brought the house down and caught the attention of Burgum, who was in Western Pennsylvania for several hours at the hydraulic fracturing site to discuss the Trump administration’s energy policies.
After Burgum spoke, Steffee said Burgum pulled him aside, told him how impressed he was with his speech, and asked him how things were going for labor and the natural gas industry.
“I said to him, ‘Secretary Burgum, if there’s one thing that I would like to make a point to you and the president and the secretary of energy, it is that the boilermakers are ready to build out any energy infrastructure and power plants for the future, and I know that we’re going to need electricity, and there’s one thing the boilermakers know how to do, and that’s build power plants,’” Steffee said.
Steffee said he immediately hit it off with Burgum, so much so that the interior secretary, who also chairs the National Energy Dominance Council, which President Donald Trump launched shortly after taking office in January, asked him to attend the big signing on the coal industry the following week at the White House.
“I said coal-fired power plants is the bread and butter of the boilermakers. We maintained all these plants and built them in the past. I’m holding on to three of them right now, plus a waste burner. And he goes, ‘I think all that’s going to change,’” Steffee explained.
A few days later, Steffee was in the Oval Office after receiving a personal invitation from the White House. He spent more time with Burgum and even met the president of the United States.
“I’m still kind of pinching myself that I got to meet the president in the White House,” Steffee said, adding, “This is why you have a guy like Burgum in your Cabinet, who really has a feel for the working man, understands that we need to win this AI race, and it is the working man who is going to power it and isn’t going around talking about how great he is. He just shows up and works.”
To understand the effectiveness of the former two-term North Dakota governor and onetime rival of Trump in the Republican primary last year is to see him firsthand through the eyes of the people he interacts with.
Burgum hails from the tiny village of Arthur, North Dakota, with a population of 328.
When he was earning his way through college at North Dakota State University, his side hustle was as a chimney sweep, a noble profession he shared with another speaker at the event, Toby Rice, the young president and CEO of EQT Corporation, the largest natural gas producer in the U.S.
Like Burgum, Rice has emerged from humble beginnings to being at the top of his game.
After college, Burgum started his software company, Great Plains, but it was not without risk. He mortgaged the farmland for the seed capital for Great Plains. Eighteen years later, in 2001, Microsoft acquired the company for $1.1 billion, and he stayed on as vice president until 2007.
When he decided to run for governor, the first office he had ever run for, he was in a crowded primary that included North Dakota’s longtime attorney general. It was a major upset. He took a chance at another long shot for office in the Republican primary last year, but it wasn’t meant to be for him or anyone else in that primary field.
But his bond with Trump, whom he supported in 2016 and 2020, intensified instead of diminished. He was a prolific campaigner for Trump and, at one point, was considered a front-runner to be his vice presidential pick.
He seems to be built, however, for his role as interior secretary. His visit to Range Resources underscored it.
The company, founded in 1976, has a long and storied history in Appalachia. It was the first company to pioneer the Marcellus Shale in Washington County in 2004. Last year, it celebrated the 20th anniversary of the initial well drilled here that introduced the world to what is now considered one of the world’s largest natural gas fields.
It is headquartered in Fort Worth, Texas, but its shale operations are in Pennsylvania. Range is one of the top 10 producers of natural gas and natural gas liquids in the U.S. and has been an economic game changer not just for the industry but for labor and farmers, who thrive from the royalty and lease payments.
How big is the industry here? If Pennsylvania were an independent country, it would now rank as the fifth-largest gas producer behind the U.S., Russia, Iran, and China. It is the second-largest net supplier of total energy to other states in the country.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Burgum said Pennsylvania was at the forefront of supplying energy to the country’s first Industrial Revolution when oil was struck in Titusville in the 1850s. This discovery powered the machinery and innovations that built this country well into the 20th century.
Now, Burgum said, Pennsylvania is at the forefront of supplying energy for the second Industrial Revolution, which he said is the artificial intelligence race.
“The race for AI dominance is the new arms race, and it is a race the United States must win,” Burgum said, adding that it starts here.
“I think the thing that people don’t understand is that the energy business is a high-tech business, and the level of innovation that’s occurring here, I mean the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence, fiber optics, what they’re doing, the efficiency gains that they’ve been able to achieve here,” he said while walking around the drill pad.
“It is one of the reasons why the U.S. shale revolution is a miracle, but that miracle — it keeps on getting better and better. It’s the thing that has literally turned around the economy in our country.”
Burgum said the shale industry does not get enough credit for all the folks involved in the shale revolution: “It has been a trillion-dollar tax cut to Americans in terms of lower cost of energy. And as you can see here on this site, these guys are developing thousands of acres of underground resources from just a few-acre site. And so, compared to other sources of energy, it also has the least amount of surface disruption.”
As for critics of the industry, he believes they have it all backward. “I say people that care about the environment, you should be demanding that, insisting that every ounce of it is, whether it’s electricity or whether it’s liquid fuels, that it’s produced here in the United States,” he said.
Burgum was also bullish on coal: “Coal in the future is going to be inside of that coal mine, not just for the metallurgical, but the thermal coal inside of them, where are some of the highest percentages of the rare earth minerals that we need that we’re now importing from China,” he said.
“Mining is going to come back,” he said bluntly. “It’s not just drill, baby, drill. It’s going to be map, baby, map. We’ve got to figure out where all these minerals are again. And then we gotta mine, baby, mine, and then we can build, baby, build,” he said.
Burgum said that we’ve got the four babies: “So, we are drilling, we are mapping, we are mining, and we’re building.” He smiled, adding, “That is part of how we get America back on track.”
Steffee, the towering and charismatic labor leader whose presence reflects that of a Pittsburgh Steeler linebacker, said he was thrilled this month when, days after the smokestacks and cooling towers of Pennsylvania’s largest coal-fired power plant came down in a dramatic fashion, Homer City Redevelopment announced an even bigger natural gas power center would be built in its place.
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“All we want to do is roll up our sleeves and work, and this is big, huge,” he said of Homer City Energy Campus, which will be a series of natural gas plants that will power a massive AI data center campus employing over 10,000 in a billion-dollar investment.
Burgum smiled and nodded, saying that is what we will do, “Build, baby, build.”
Salena Zito is a national political correspondent for the Washington Examiner.
