Trump win brings ‘breath of fresh air’ to oil and gas industry, Energy Transfer CEO says

The election of Donald Trump as the next U.S. president will bring “a breath of fresh air” to the oil and gas industry, Energy Transfer (NYSE:ET) co-CEO Mackie McCrea said Wednesday, in some of the first public comments by a senior energy industry figure since Trump’s victory.

“We’re not arguing that we don’t need to be regulated,” McCrea said on the company’s quarterly earnings call, according to Bloomberg, “but we’re asking for reasonable, not onerous regulation that can be done in a matter of a few years, [without] hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of getting projects in-line.”

Energy Transfer’s (ET) billionaire executive chairman and founder Kelcy Warren, who did not speak on the call, was a significant financial backer of Trump’s campaign.

The company also said on the call that it has received requests for connections to more than 90 power plants and data centers that could total ~16B cf/day of new natural gas demand.

“We are already seeing increasing power needs across several of our natural gas pipelines, driven by AI data center and power plant growth,” co-CEO Tom Long said, Reuters reported.

“Do we expect to get 16B cf/day? No, [but] we do expect to get our fair share,” McCrea said.

Energy Transfer (ET) +0.7% post-market Wednesday after reporting Q3 net income of $1.18B, roughly double the $584M in the year-earlier quarter, as crude transportation volumes jumped 24.5% to more than 7M bbl/day, setting a new partnership record, and crude oil exports climbed 49%.