Final week, 1000’s of individuals gathered in Houston, Texas for CERAWeek 2025, maybe probably the most vital annual meet-up of the community of oil executives, traders, consultants, authorities officers, and extra, that make up and assist the fossil gas business.
Contained in the gathering, oil, finance, and tech executives joined a slew of panels discussing a variety of vitality business matters. High Trump officers spoke, together with US Power Secretary Chris Wright and US Inside secretary Doug Burgum. In accordance with Guardian local weather reporter Dharna Noor, “Wright mentioned international warming was merely a wanted “side-effect” of modernization, whereas Burgum referred to as to “take our pure sources and switch them into pure belongings.”
In the meantime, outdoors CERAWeek, lots of of local weather activists protested the convention’s show of billionaire energy and celebration of fossil fuels, with a number of activists arrested.
What’s CERAWeek, anyhow? Who or what’s the energy behind CERAWeek? What capabilities does CERAWeek carry out for the fossil gas business energy construction? Who have been among the key billionaires at CERAWeek? This primer will handle these questions.
What Is CERAWeek?
CERAWeek is an enormous, transnational gathering of highly effective folks tied to the vitality business, together with prime fossil gas executives, huge monetary traders, and high-level authorities officers and regulators.
The Houston Chronicle — newspaper of the fossil gas capital of the US, the place CERAWeek is held — has labelled the occasion the “Tremendous Bowl of vitality,” awash with “vitality insiders.” Local weather activist Invoice McKibben has referred to it as “the hydrocarbon world’s greatest competition, a Davos for carbon.”
CERAWeek performs a number of capabilities for the vitality business. These embody serving as an area to debate and debate business developments; have interaction in networking and dealmaking; maintain high-level conversations between executives, traders and regulators; and broadly, to advertise and legitimize the business with a high-profile occasion.
1000’s of contributors attend CERAWeek. In 2023, round 7,200 folks from 90 nations flocked to the occasion. It claims to be rated among the many prime 5 “company chief conferences” worldwide.
Leaders from the best heights of politics and business attend CERAWeek. Previous speakers have included Invoice Clinton, George W. Bush, Justin Trudeau, Narendra Modi, Henry Kissinger to Invoice Gates.
This 12 months, new Trump Power Secretary Chris Wright and Inside Secretary Doug Burgum have been audio system, together with CEOs or different prime executives of fossil gas firms that span the gamut of the business, from Huge Oil giants to LNG export firms, oil pipeline firms to utilities. A few of these embody ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Oxy, BP, Cheniere, Pioneer, Enbridge, NRG, EQT, Baker Hughes, Hunt Power, Williams Firms, Hess, NextEra, Nationwide Grid, and Freeport LNG — simply to call a number of.
Harold Hamm of Continental Assets — possibly the business’s closest ally to Donald Trump — was a speaker. High leaders from business teams like American Petroleum Institute, American Fuel Affiliation and Edison Worldwide attended.
Critically, main Wall Road traders and tech giants additionally attended CERAWeek. These embody asset managers like BlackRock, personal fairness companies like Carlyle, Apollo, and Blackstone, and tech firms like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet (the guardian firm of Google).
Neither is CERAWeek a solely U.S. affair. Authorities and company representatives from nations everywhere in the world — Saudi Arabia to Canada, Turkey to Nigeria, South Korea to Kuwait — attended as effectively.
Who Guidelines CERAWeek?
Whereas CERAWeek is stuffed with business representatives, it’s dominated by main company gamers. Completely different “Partners” sponsor the convention, presumably by hefty charges, and the most important sponsors acquire probably the most entry and energy in shaping the occasion’s tone and content material.
For instance, in keeping with the sponsorship brochure from the 2024 CERAWeek convention, the best degree of sponsorship, which is proscribed to just some firms and companies, is “Foundational.”
These sponsors “profit from the best ranges of entry, visibility, and government assist” and “play a management position inside the CERAWeek neighborhood and are offered premier engagement and contribution.” Foundational Companions additionally “might collaborate with CERAWeek to develop a personalized Particular Program or neighborhood aligned with particular targets.”
This 12 months’s Foundational Companions were Chevron, Amazon, and BlackRock, in addition to skilled companies agency Marsh McLennan and the coal firm Xcoal.
The subsequent degree of Companions are “Strategic,” which “helps energetic engagement and entry throughout a variety of the CERAWeek neighborhood.” Amongst different issues, Strategic Companions’ “targets are supported by the CERAWeek Steering Committee,” and these Companions “obtain precedence consideration to contribute content material and entry to CERAWeek Personal Communities.
Strategic Companions for CERAWeek 2025 included ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, EQT, Freeport LNG, NextEra, Carlyle Group, Microsoft, and dozens extra.
Notably, a significant energy participant behind CERAWeek is Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer-prize successful writer who helped discovered the convention over 4 a long time in the past and serves as chairman of CERAWeek and Vice Chairman of S&P International, the well-known monetary companies firm that runs CERAWeek (learn extra on Yergin under).
The Fossil Gas Trade, the Houston Energy Elite & the Houston Police Basis
The ability elite of Houston is deeply intertwined with the fossil gas business. Power firms dominate the board of town’s fundamental chamber of commerce, the Better Houston Partnership, making up round 1 / 4 of its membership. Houston is among the fossil gas company headquarters of the world, house to key international and regional places of work of many numerous companies together with ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, Occidental, and plenty of others.
The fossil gas business additionally has a detailed relationship with the Houston Police Division by the Houston Police Basis, a non-profit that channels company donations to metropolis police. Oil billionaires like Jeffery Hildebrand sit on the Houston Police Basis board, and the inspiration helps fund police applications, together with the Mounted Patrol that aided assaults on local weather activists throughout CERAWeek.
In truth, oil firms like Chevron, Shell and Valero sponsor particular person Mounted Patrol horses. (For extra on police foundations and their ties to the fossil gas business, take a look at our 2020 story and our 2021 report coauthored with Shade of Change).
CERAWeek and the Fossil Gas Trade Energy Construction
CERAWeek performs a number of roles inside the fossil gas business and wider vitality energy construction.
Legitimizing the Fossil Gas Trade
Whereas CERAWeek finally capabilities as a present of drive for the fossil gas business and an area for it to hash issues out, it has a veneer of legitimizing wonkiness and experience.
CERAWeek was based by Daniel Yergin within the early Nineteen Eighties, a embellished writer who has carved out an area as a benign interlocutor between the fossil gas business and civil society — an writer with mental bona fides who has deep and direct private ties to the company vitality world.
Yergin has quite a few influential ties to tutorial establishments, like MIT and Columbia College, and government-aligned suppose tanks just like the Council on International Relations and the Brookings Establishment. He has authored a number of well-known books concerning the fossil gas business — most notably his award-winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power — whereas additionally serving on advisory boards and boards of administrators of key business teams and suppose tanks worldwide.
Over his profession, Yergin has run high-profile energy consulting firms and serves as a Senior Advisor with personal fairness big Carlyle Group (a “Strategic Partner” of CERAWeek that can also be a significant fossil gas investor).
All advised, the spectacle of an enormous, public-facing convention, effectively coated by the media, celebrating and discussing the vitality business and its fossil gas giants, all given a wonkish gloss by analysts, lecturers and consultants, gives cowl for an business whose core operations are extensively recognized to be driving local weather chaos.
Networking, Schmoozing, Dealmaking
Gatherings like CERAWeek are important websites for business networking. CERAWeeks says it convenes “over 450 C-Suite executives, 80 ministers and prime officers, and 325 media representatives.”
Contributors chat, schmooze and socialize behind closed doorways or at any variety of prolonged Blissful Hours. This helps construct and domesticate relationships and permits for conversations that result in new contracts, offers, positions, and so forth.
At CERAWeek, this networking is all of the extra essential as a result of many high-level representatives of presidency and worldwide firms are attending. The vitality priorities which might be hashed out by these conversations — the formal panels, and likewise the backroom dialogue — can have deep implications for international vitality coverage and geopolitics (one of many occasion’s themes).
Taking Inventory of Trade Developments and Fractions
CERAWeek’s enormous numbers and bold agenda additionally current a second for taking inventory of the vitality business’s current and its future. Convention themes discover the gamut of areas inside the company vitality world. This 12 months’s themes included Coverage and Regulation, Oil and Fuel, Energy, Grid and Electrification, Commerce and Provide Chains, Enterprise Methods, Minerals and Mining, Expertise and Innovation, and extra.
Completely different fractions of the vitality business, some aspiring, also can use CERAWeek to make their case. “AI and Digital,” for instance, is a convention theme this 12 months.
The rise of information facilities wanted to energy AI has strengthened the nexus between the fossil gas business, Huge Tech, and monetary traders, on the expense of a inexperienced vitality transition.
The occasion can also be stuffed with the world’s prime personal fairness companies and asset managers, who stay not solely wedded to fossil fuels however retreated from earlier internet zero commitments – certainly, Finance (“The Capital Transition”) was a theme of CERAWeek this 12 months.
Greenwashing
CERAWeek can also be a efficiency in greenwashing. The fossil gas business at this time is concurrently doubling down on its core enterprise of oil and gasoline extraction and manufacturing whereas additionally giving lip service to considerations over carbon emissions and searching for to seize and revenue from false options like carbon seize and hydrogen.
CERAWeek permits the fossil gas business to do each this stuff. The convention is dominated by fossil gas giants who’re currently racing to drill and burn extra oil and gasoline, but in addition to gobble up subsidies and produce hydrogen plants — falsely selling hydrogen as a local weather “answer.”
Certainly, CERAWeek 2025 included themes like “Managing Emissions,” “Local weather and Sustainability,” and “Hydrogen and Low-Carbon Fuels.” However as Kate Aronoff reported on a earlier CERAWeek: “There’s some folks concerned with copper and lithium and varied issues, however the principle focus is oil and gasoline, and with a fairly particular focus inside oil and gasoline on among the greater firms.”
CERAWeek’s Billionaires
Among the many strongest folks at CERAWeek are a slew of oil billionaires, tech titans, and fossil gas financiers who, whether or not they present up in individual, stand to learn from the discussions and deal-making that happen on the gathering. Amongst these are:
- Harold Hamm, value $18.5 billion, who’s the founder, chairman and CEO of Continental Assets, a top ten U.S. unbiased oil producer. Hamm, who mobilized business assist for Trump’s reelection, could be the key liaison between the fossil gas business and the Trump administration. Hamm celebrated Trump’s inauguration by internet hosting “an unique fossil gas business celebration on Inauguration Day” whose visitors included Inside Secretary Doug Burgum, according to The New York Instances. Hamm was a speaker at CERAWeek 2025.
- Larry Fink, value $1.2 billion, who’s the founder, chairman, and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s greatest asset supervisor and a prime “Foundational Partner” of CERAWeek 2025. BlackRock is a prime shareholder of almost each publicly-traded fossil gas firm, and Fink could be the most influential CEO on Wall Road. BlackRock was a prime sponsor of CERAWeek and, as Dharna Noor of the Guardian reported, Fink wore a silicone bracelet on the gathering that learn “make vitality nice once more” — a far cry from his lip service to local weather change just some years in the past. Fink was additionally a speaker at CERAWeek.
- David Rubenstein, value $3.8 billion, who’s a cofounder and co-executive chairman of personal fairness big Carlyle Group, a “Strategic Partner” sponsor of CERAWeek which has numerous fossil gas holdings. Even when it bought off a hefty portfolio of gas-fired energy vegetation in late 2024, the Personal Fairness Stakeholder Venture mentioned that Carlyle was “perpetuating the local weather disaster” by offloading them “reasonably than responsibly transitioning the belongings to wash vitality technology or retiring and remediating the harm brought on by the belongings.”
- Jeff Bezos, the founder and government chairman of Amazon value $214 billion, whose Amazon Internet Providers was a prime “Foundational Companion” of CERAWeek. Amazon and different tech firms that oversee cloud infrastructure stand to revenue from the technification of all the things and particularly the AI increase. As journalist Kate Aronoff writes: “Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all management cloud computing infrastructure that’s poised to learn from the energy-intensive imaginative and prescient of AI growth these builders are pushing.”
Lots of of Local weather Activists Protest CERAWeek
Recognizing the chance to disrupt mainstream messaging about CERAWeek, and to confront the fossil gas business and raise up the tales of frontline communities preventing fossil gas infrastructure, dozens of local weather justice teams participated in coordinated days of actions protesting CERAWeek. Lots of of elders, younger folks, and residents of rural areas and cities, marched to demand an finish to fossil fuels and accountability of rich polluters.
Activists particularly targeted on the construct out of methane gasoline (additionally recognized by euphemism “liquified pure gasoline”) export terminals alongside the Gulf South. These export terminals depend on transporting fracked gasoline through pipelines and have notoriously imperiled native communities on account of toxic air releases, overdrawing water resources, and destroying precious marine habitats. In June of 2022, the Freeport LNG terminal really exploded, sending a 450-foot ball of fireside and pollution into the air, shaking the homes of close by residents.
Freeport LNG’s CEO, billionaire Michael Smith, was a featured speaker at CERAWeek, stating that methane gasoline was “crucial,” echoing different audio system’ sentiments which downplayed the pressing want for renewable vitality sources.
On the end result of the march, eight frontline and Indigenous activists and allies sat within the intersection in entrance of the CERAWeek convention. The Houston Police Division violently attacked these activists with Mounted Patrol horses earlier than conducting arrests.
As famous above, main oil and gasoline firms sponsor these horses, underscoring the tight and diverse relationships between policing and the vitality business to suppress struggles in opposition to fossil fuels.
CERAWeek, an extravagant show of billionaire energy and the convergence of the fossil gas business, authorities, tech and finance, stood in stark distinction to these within the march — on a regular basis folks preventing for clear water and air of their hometowns, sovereignty for Indigenous communities, an finish to extractive vitality techniques, and a habitable future for generations to return.
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