Doug Burgum
speaker
1,008 appearances
32 recordings
11 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 5 Jun
Doug Burgum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 23 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 6.
Appearances
You know, show me a tech company that's done that. I mean, impossible.
Well, the lease and they lease it up front. So they write a check up front to have the opportunity to take the risk. They take all the risk. They build the platform. They hire the people. They do the seismic. They figure it out. And if they hit a dry hole, it's all on them. Taxpayer, nothing. But if they score, then they pay us a royalty. And what do we use that for?
We use it for, you know, we use it for paying down the deficit and the debt. We also use it for coastal restoration. along this beautiful Gulf Coast. You do coastal restoration with that. The dollars go back to the states. The largest funder of coastal restoration in this country is the oil and gas industry here in the Gulf.
So again, like I said, if you've driven on an interstate highway in your life or if you've gone to a public school, you should send a thank you note to the natural resource industries because they were helping to pay for that. But what's happened? If there's $100 trillion on the balance sheet, just say that,
And now, and you're a finance tech venture guy, you can say, okay, we'll allow the federal government to be the worst. You guys can have a 1% return on your natural assets. That would be $1 trillion. Okay. Last year, Interior brought in $22 billion. So we're off by a factor of 50 from having bad performance on getting a return on investment for the American people.
Because we don't even know what the base unused resource is. I mean, we're trying to get our hands around, you know, what is our timber worth? What is our oil and gas? And that goes back to the core mission of the U.S. Geologic Survey. Its original core mission was to map.
So when we say it's, you know, it's map, baby, map, because then that can tell you, you know, where you're supposed to mine, baby, mine, where you're supposed to drill, baby, drill. But getting back to the mapping and working with the private sector who's outstripped Who's outstripped?
I mean, ground penetrating radar is, you know, a new advancement that's more accurate than seismic and less intrusive. And we need to really understand what America's balance sheet is. And some of that's going to take some work for us to get out there and really survey it. And then when we have that, that's public domain.
Publish that information and that'll help the private sector steer where they should put their resources to help develop this.
Well, I think there was some, you know, our country was a powerful and great miner. And it was when you think back to, you know, even the early 1900s, you think about where we were, you know, what we were doing in gold and silver. And then, you know, through World War II and even up into the 1980s, we were still very strong as a mining country and a mining industry.
And then there were some environmental issues, that environmental awareness. You had some Superfund sites. And it just became one of the focal points of the attack of of hay, then it sort of was all of a sudden all mining was bad as opposed to one operator in one location that maybe wasn't maintained right.
And so then I think whether it was young people choosing careers or whether it was press, whatever, but then the regulatory environment piled on in a heavy way to the point that it's just amazing. One of the Resolution Copper, we're just in the process now of issuing them a permit. It's taken about three months here in the Trump administration. They started this process over 29 years ago.
I mean, this has gone three decade long saga to open up a copper mine. And guess what? We need copper more than we've ever needed before. I mean, it's part of every electric motor. It's a part of all of the advanced stuff that we're building. And so, I mean, it's thrilling that we're gonna open a copper mine in America.
And then some of the mines that have barely hung on, but are still going, whether it's gold or silver or others, uranium in some cases, Along with that mining process, there are critical minerals that are adjacent. I mean, we can add a critical minerals refining because it's not just that we aren't mining those raw materials. China has got the corner on the refining, not just mine to refine.
So when they're in the Congo in Africa, pulling out those research rich minerals, they're bringing those back to China. We've got examples of companies in America that were mining in America, but there was no process. They were sending that to China and China was doing the refining.
Well, now we're literally in a war around these critical minerals, which we need for defense, and we don't have a stockpile. So part of what we're concerned with right now and said, how do we get capital flowing back to mining? How do we start building stockpiles in America the way we have the Strategic Petroleum Reserve across the top 20 most important critical minerals?
And then how do we de-risk it if someone's going to get into mining? And do we need like a sovereign risk insurance but not because you're working overseas, because you're working here, because the next administration may use an EO to wipe out your mind.
And so, again, giving the capital providers the confidence that if somehow they're regulated out of business, they'll get compensated through an insurance program.
Well, Lee Zeldin, our EPA administrator, is also a key part of the Energy Dominance Council, as is about half of the cabinet. I mean, we've got Howard Lutnick, Scott Besant, Brooke Rollins, you know, from AG with U.S. Forest Service. There's literally about half the cabinet. Transportation, Sean Duffy's on there.
Everybody's, you know, part of this team of trying to solve this larger, complex thing. But I would say that the one thing we forget about when we often there's these national discussions, which is that every state also has a regulatory environment. And in my time as governor, one thing I learned was that there was I never met a bureaucrat from D.C.
Showing 861–880 of 1,008 · page 44 of 51
← Previous
Next →