DAVID BLACKMON: What 2026 Will Deliver On Energy Policy

As the end of 2025 nears, the question arises: What can Americans expect in the world of energy policy in 2026?

Predicting future events where energy is concerned is always a risky enterprise. After all, if anyone could accurately foresee where, say, the Brent price for crude oil would sit a week from today, that person would soon become fabulously wealthy and never have to work another day in his or her life. But no one can actually do that because too many widely disparate factors impact where prices will head on a daily basis. This overarching theme holds true in most areas of the widely diverse energy space.

Still, just as energy details like exact future oil prices or rig count levels are impossible to know with certainty, some overarching trends are entirely foreseeable. As an example, it was entirely predictable a year ago that 2025 would become a year in which an energy policy revolution would take place. Donald Trump had been elected to a second term and was in the process of naming cabinet nominees who would lead an effort to reverse the onerous regulations and economically ruinous subsidy spending of the Biden years.

A policy revolution was entirely predictable, even though, as I wrote at the time, it would take a somewhat different form than many were expecting. There would be no replay of the “Drill, Baby, Drill” agenda of Trump’s first term mainly due to a series of intractable economic factors. Instead, we’d have a “Build, Baby, Build” revolution in which policy changes have focused on setting the conditions for a boom in energy infrastructure like pipelines, LNG export facilities, baseload power generation, major transmission projects, new and expanded mining operations, and more into place.

With business-oriented cabinet officials like Chris Wright at the Energy Department and Doug Burgum at Interior leading the way, it was easy to predict that the second Trumpian energy revolution would focus on measures that allow markets, not the dictates of central government planners, to lead the charge. The command-and-control schemes, crony capitalism, and green subsidies would be repealed or phased away. Banks and investment houses would be put on notice that their discriminatory, ESG-focused lending practices would be policed. Rather than focus their personal energy on finding ways to punish disfavored energy players, administration officials would spend their days finding ways to speed up permitting processes.

Those things and more all came about in Year One of this second Trump presidency. It has been a true policy-driven revolution.

Now, as the dawn of 2026 nears, the direction of the administration’s Year Two agenda becomes equally predictable: Consolidation of the gains made in 2025.

The ending/phasing out of the green subsidies must be maintained since they distort markets by encouraging irrational allocations of capital. The capital thrown at wind and solar will be more productively allocated to building new natural gas and nuclear baseload plants and ensuring existing coal plants stay up and running to keep America’s lights on. The capital misallocated by legacy carmakers – like Ford and GM – to their foundering EV dreams must be reallocated to making cars American consumers can afford and actually desire to own.

With global markets creating rapidly rising demand for U.S. LNG, it’s time to “Build, Baby, Build” those needed new export facilities and the pipelines needed to feed the gas into them. Those energy gains can’t be consolidated without driving into action the streamlined processes to issue the needed permits.

And then there are the mines. Regardless of how quickly their permits can be issued, America can’t have any of the pipelines, LNG facilities, power plants, AI datacenters, or transmission lines without the raw mineral materials that make them work. America can no longer afford to be held hostage to supply chains for these materials dominated by China. That means more mines, and lots of them.

The President and his people have worked overtime throughout 2025 to ensure the executive branch’s side of this policy revolution is in place. Now, Congress must act to enshrine it permanently in law. Getting that done, consolidating the gains made in 2025 into action and statutes, will dominate the energy policy agenda throughout 2026. It’s all very predictable.

David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.

The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

(Featured Image Media Credit: Screen Capture/PBS NewsHour)