Speaker 1:
From the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, welcome inside the Ice House. Our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange is your go-to for the latest on markets, leadership, vision, and business. For over 230 years, the NYSE has been the beating heart of global growth. Each week we bring you inspiring stories of innovators, job creators, and the movers and shakers of capitalism here at the NYSE and ISIS exchanges around the world. Now let's go inside the Ice House, here's your host Kristen Scholer.
Kristen Scholer:
The US energy industry is the engine that powers modern life keeping cities, bright industries thriving and essential services running smoothly. It fuels the American dream by creating millions of high paying jobs and driving robust economic growth. Affordable energy means lower costs for families, stronger infrastructure, and a more resilient economy, while US energy leadership enhances global security supports allies and brings opportunity to energy starved regions. Back in 2022 inside the Ice House. For episode 327, we welcomed Chris Wright, then CEO of Liberty Energy, that is NYSE ticker symbol LBRT. Three years later with Wright now serving in the Trump administration as US Secretary of Energy, we turn the spotlight to Liberty Energy's new CEO, Ron Gusek. With more than eight years serving as president of the company and 25 years of experience in the oil and gas sector, Ron steps into this role at a pivotal time for both Liberty and the broader energy industry. Ron, thanks so much for joining us inside the Ice House.
Ron Gusek:
It's a pleasure to be with you here today.
Kristen Scholer:
It's great to have you, of course, an NYSE listed company and let's dive right in. It's the second time that we've had the opportunity to feature Liberty Energy here inside the Ice House. Back in 2022, then CEO and now Secretary of Energy, Chris Wright joined us. Fast-forward three years later and we're thrilled to welcome you. So for those who might not have caught that episode or they might not be familiar with Liberty Energy, give us a sense about the company's purpose and mission.
Ron Gusek:
Sure. Let me take a step back. We're 14 years old now, and when we started the organization back then, it was with a very simple idea in mind. We had the premise that if you could create an organization that attracted and retained the best people, and we're a service company, so we are a people forward business, that you could offer a differential level of service that people maybe hadn't seen elsewhere. And so our mission statement became a very simple one, to build the best darn frack company period. That was it. And we aim to create an environment, a culture where people would want to come and stay and not just work for a few years, but ultimately be here for their entire career. Most of the people that work at Liberty work out in the field. About 90% of our workforce is out there at the tip of the spear, maybe a 12-hour shift, day or night.
They're living in a camp away from home for a couple of weeks of the year and so it's a very challenging job. It's tough to get those people to make a career of that. It's time away from your family. You miss events that your children might be having or your parents might be having or whatever the case might be. And so we wanted to find a way to make Liberty a place where they would come and stay. And so with that premise behind us, we embarked on a mission to create what was a differential company, and we've been incredibly successful at that. So now fast-forward 14 years later, we are now the number two frack company in North America. We have a platform that operates all the way from Northeastern British Columbia down to the US Mexico border. We've expanded beyond just our core business of frack that we started in to now offer wireline services. We have a manufacturing division. We have a couple of sand mines in our world. We have a logistics business that helps support the movement of sand, and now we're embarking on the power business.
So we've come a long ways from those early days of 14 years ago, and I'm proud to say that in all of that time. A couple of things that I would really highlight that I think talk about who Liberty is and what we've really become. Number one is turnover. I've worked in the oil field services business a long time, maybe 25 years now. And in all of that time rarely worked at an organization where our turnover in the field wasn't close to maybe 50% on an annual basis. So we had to replace half of our people. Liberty's turnover today, about a quarter of that. Which means that our crews are experienced, that they are safe, that they are efficient, that they have been together a long, long time. They are a tight-knit.
Family. And then from a financial performance standpoint, of course, as a publicly listed company, we are in business for our shareholders as well. And over that timeframe, of course, we've had two of the biggest downturns I've had in my career, the 15, 16 downturn in COVID. We've delivered a 23% cash return on capital invested averaged over that entire thing, including those downturns. So incredibly excited about where we are and looking forward to the coming decades.
Kristen Scholer:
It is an incredible journey, Ron, certainly that you've had, that the company's had as well. You've had a multinational career spanning over 25 years, including the last 11 of them at Liberty Energy, eight of which you spent as president. How have those experiences prepared you for your role as CEO?
Ron Gusek:
Oh, there's a lot to unpack there. I would start with just the early days of my career where of course we've all been through management teams where things worked well and maybe where you saw things that could have been done a little differently. And certainly I've had some of both. I've had some things where I looked up at a leader and was truly impressed, motivated, thrilled to get up and go to work for them every day. You've had more challenging situations where you look up and think, "Oh, maybe I might've handled that a little bit differently." Those are learning experiences that I've carried with me over my career and ultimately hope to carry forward now in my role as CEO at Liberty. I've traveled internationally, I've spent time in Russia, I've spent time in the Middle East. I had the opportunity to visit the industry in China as well.
And so you get a sense of what we do here and how it's done differently elsewhere, the different pace at which things move, the difference that technology can make. Lots of fantastic learning experiences there that I have also brought forward. But I think probably the biggest thing I would point to was the opportunity to grow up in terms of thinking about how to run a business alongside of now Secretary Wright. Chris and I have been friends and colleagues for 20 years now, and I really had the chance to learn how to run a business alongside of him. And so I'm excited for him and his new role and excited to carry on the vision that he set out for us 14 years ago when we started the company.
Kristen Scholer:
Well, you were appointed at Chief Executive Officer in early February, and as you look ahead to 2025, of course we're chatting here at the end of the first quarter. What have been some of your early priorities in the role?
Ron Gusek:
Probably a couple of big ones that I would name. First of all, I would say that we have a very mature oilfield services business now. We've been in the frack and wireline business for 14 years. We are maybe about 20% of the North American market share today. We have a tremendous culture and an awesome team that delivers those services every day, want to make sure that that continues down the path that it is on. And so I have a strong focus on continuing to evolve the technology there to continue to ensure that we provide industry leading service to our customers there. And then in parallel with that to take what is our nascent power business and grow that into a great, great business as well to take our expertise, our software development, our supply chain, our strong HR team, our focus on culture, innovative technology, all of those things to branch out into a spot that we have not been before. But ultimately to grow a successful business there that generates the same sort of strong returns for our investors that we have been able to do on the oilfield services side of things.
Kristen Scholer:
To that end, Ron, how do you think Liberty Energy's prospects for success look like this year?
Ron Gusek:
I'd rank them very high. Of course, I'm excited about our core business. Oil looks to be pretty stable this year. Obviously a little background noise in the world these days, but our customers have indicated a plan around at least flat and maybe even modest growth on their side of things and so that translates into a pretty stable outlook in terms of our oil focused world. Natural gas, I'm quite excited about. You hear a lot of opportunities there around both LNG export and power generation to support increased power demand here. Both of those demand increased volumes of produced natural gas here, onshore and North America, and so that is a positive for our business. So I'm quite excited about those things. And then in parallel with that, we're growing the power business and the outlook for that looks incredibly strong. I can't turn a page in the news these days without reading about incremental power demand and where that's going to come from, how we're going to meet that need. And I'm excited to play even just a small role in that new and exciting world.
Kristen Scholer:
Well, I know we've talked about culture and how important that is to you here at the helm of Liberty Energy known for its strong culture, which makes employees feel valued and supported. How has this culture contributed to making the company an industry leader?
Ron Gusek:
That's a very important question. I think culture is a difficult thing to wrap your hands around. I think back to when we first went public, we were out on the road talking to investors about what it is that made our company special, what made it unique, what delivered the level of service we provide out in the field. And you're trying to describe culture and they're trying to figure out a way to put that in a financial model to attach some numbers to it. And that's not an easy thing to do. It's something that ultimately is best demonstrated. And I think we've been able to do that now. I think after being a public company for seven years, people now understand what that culture is and what it brings to the table and what it's meant from a different standpoint. But if you back up to maybe what I said at the opening around trying to attract and retain great folks, it's important to build culture from the ground up. And so that was a very conscious decision from day one when we started the company.
It's very, very hard to change the culture in an organization. It's like turning a large ship. And so I think it was important that we made that decision very early on to be that organization and then to find ways to continue to support that. As we grew in size and scale. People would often say, "That's great that you have that culture now. You're a small company, you're only a few hundred employees. That's easy to do, but you're never going to be able to do that when you're 5,000 or 6,000 people big." Well, we're almost 6,000 people big. And I think if you went out to the field today and asked our team, they would tell you that we have a very, very unique culture. And I credit the folks out in the field for that.
The people who have been here for a long time who've been here since the early days of Liberty, know and understand what that culture is and they work hard to carry that on as we grow to new districts, to new states, and as new employees come on board, they help each of those people understand what that culture is. And that continues to propagate through the organization. And so what that ultimately leads to though is a cohesiveness, a bit of pride in what they do each and every day. Each and every one of our crews, and we run about 40 of them on the frack side and mid-thirties on the wireline side are tight-knit little families. It's a group of 20 people that work together day in and day out. They'll spend their two weeks together, they go home to their families and then they come back and they're together again. And their success is intertwined, one with the other. It's not one individual who can make a frack crew successful out there, but that team together.
And so when you have that low turnover, when you have that tight-knit bond amongst the people that work there together, it delivers itself in a level of service, in pride of execution. You see it even in the equipment when you go out there to look at it, it's shiny clean. And our customers see that, they can feel that firsthand in the interactions they have with the people at Liberty. They see that in the service that they get. They feel that from the support, whether it's our supply chain team or our IT team or the HR team, whatever the case might be, they feel that. And the end result is that there's an organization called Kimberlite that does a survey across a range of different areas, but frack is one of them. And since they have started that survey in I think it was 2016, Liberty has been the number one ranked frack company.
They call all of our customers and they ask to rank all of the service companies on a series of categories. And Liberty has been the number one company in that survey for as many years as it's been going on, I think eight years running now. But that's a testament to the people in the field and the culture and ties that bind them together.
Kristen Scholer:
Well, in late January, Liberty Energy and NYSE listed Cummins announced state partnership to develop and deploy the industry's first natural gas variable speed large displacement engine. Congratulations.
Ron Gusek:
Thank you. That's quite a mouthful. We've been working hard to transition to natural gas as I had said. It's an important step in our world now to move away from diesel fuel and ultimately to this next generation of assets. We really have a couple of ways that we can consume natural gas in the field. One of those is to use it to generate electricity and then have an electric driven pump, and that's a very, very effective solution and one that we deploy in the field in some places. But ultimately was our goal to find a way to use that same engine, that same technology to directly drive a pump rather than having to go from gas to electricity and then back to driving a pump. It seemed like a more straightforward approach to us. And so we had a team set to work on that and ultimately they were able to crack the nut around connecting what has historically been a constant speed engine. It's like driving a car without a gas pedal. It goes at one speed only, and the only thing you could do was shift gears.
We wanted to find a way to have that same engine have a gas pedal as well. Cummins willingly took on the challenge of taking what had been a engine that only turned at one speed and figuring out a way to make that a variable speed engine specific for our application. And so we had signed a partnership deal with them back in 2024, and they went to work in the R&D labs and not too long later were able to come to the table with this variable speed gas engine, which we have now installed on a pump. We rolled out the first two of them for testing in the field in March, I guess they made their debut, so just a few weeks ago. And we're excited to trial that new technology with some of our great partners on the E&P side and trusting that we have thought about all the boxes we needed to check. And the testing goes very, very well. Look forward to deploying that at full scale across our entire operation.
Kristen Scholer:
What is your long-term vision for this technology?
Ron Gusek:
So for us, the goal ultimately is to have an entirely natural gas fueled fleet and to offer maybe a suite of capabilities there. Not all of our customers have the same requirements at the end of the day. Each and every location that we arrive at, each and every customer that we work for, each and every basin that we work in has different needs. Again, I'll take maybe Colorado as an example. We are in a non-attainment area there just by virtue of our location on the east side of the Rocky Mountains. We have ozone blow over there and it tends to stagnate in that area and so we work very, very hard on emissions there. Together with the state policy makers and industry, we're trying to find ways to minimize the impact, particularly during the summertime on high ozone days.
And that means driving down emissions. That means finding a way to ensure that even as we continue to produce the energy the country and the world need that we're doing as little as we can to contribute to the challenges in that particular environment. A natural gas engine and particularly a variable speed gas engine, goes a long ways in that regard compared to the older technology we used to run. And so it's my vision to ensure that regardless of where we are operating, regardless of the challenges that our customers might have or that we're trying to work with the regulators on, that we're able to bring a technology solution to the table that addresses that.
Kristen Scholer:
Now before the partnership with Cummins, I know Liberty Energy worked with DC Grid to deliver power solutions tailored to meet the growing energy demands, including for EV hubs and data centers. Ron, how does this collaboration position Liberty in these emerging markets?
Ron Gusek:
We're always looking for people who bring a different approach to a problem to the table, people who are willing to think outside the box around how something should be done. DC Grid is an example of that. This is a small early days company that wanted to look at EV charging done differently. I don't know if you drive an EV or have had a chance to pull up beside an EV charger, but they tend to be quite large cabinets. A big part of that cabinet is actually converting electricity from alternating current to AC to direct current DC, which is what ultimately we need to charge a battery. And there's heating that comes with that and so we need a cooling system in there to accomplish that. DC Grid was willing to think about that a little differently, and so ultimately recognized that if we converted the power from AC to DC someplace else and then distributed DC power for the EV charging infrastructure, that charging unit could be a lot smaller, far more compact, maybe even transportable.
And so their EV charger is maybe a little bigger than a suitcase, quite easy to deploy. We as their power partner will take care of the transition from AC to dc, we'll take care of that transformation of the power for them and then distribute that power by DC to all of their equipment. Their goal is to of course, be a partner in electrifying our transportation world. And so in California, think about the port of LA and the port of Long Beach. There is a goal to have all of those trucks that drive in and out of their every day be electric and DC Grid will be a partner alongside of them to provide the charging for that. And we will be a partner alongside DC Grid to provide power generation. The challenge for them unfortunately, is that they need a meaningful amount of power and inside the city of LA they've been told that it will be three or four years before the grid would be able to provide them with that level of power and so they need a partner in that.
Going a little further than that, and maybe a bit further out on the timeline would be the idea of taking that exact same premise to a data center. So today, inside of a data center, and you'll forgive me, I'm a little older. My first computer was a big tower that sat on the side of my desk and in the back of it there was a big fan running that blew a lot of heat out the back. That was where power conversion from AC to DC took place. That same challenge happens in data centers today. We distribute the power in AC, and when it gets to those large racks of computers, it's converted to DC and there's an immense amount of heat generated when that happens. And it means that a large part of the power loaded a data center is actually the cooling process to try to everything in there down at a good working temperature.
Well, DC Grid is envisioning an idea where that's no longer the case where that power conversion takes place outside the facility, that all of the power distribution inside the data center is done with DC architecture, meaning that we no longer have to deal with that heating load that comes from the conversion from AC to DC> there's been, to my knowledge, one DC data center built anywhere in the world DC Grid would love to see that change and there to be a few more of those built and we're excited to be their power partner alongside of that.
Kristen Scholer:
That's a great story. Ron. I know through this partnership, Liberty is going to focus on providing power systems solutions via its Liberty at Power Innovation Subsidiary, LPI for short, we'll call it that for now. While data centers and EV fleets may be just the beginning here, what are your expectations for LPI's growth moving forward?
Ron Gusek:
Oh, the sky's the limit, I think. We've been generating power inside of our world for a number of years now. So as we began to transition from diesel fuel to natural gas, one of the ways I said you could do that was to generate power and then run an electric pump. And so we have a number of those fleets in our world. Today we operate about 130 megawatts of power generation. We build a 30 megawatt power plant, it operates for 30 to 60 days on a location alongside our frack equipment, and then we take it down and we move it someplace else and we do it all over again. And we realize that we're actually really, really good at power generation, but we're good at power generation in a way that is different to how we've thought about power generation in North America up to this point in time.
Today, if you looked at the grid, the has been that we build a large stationary power plant someplace and then we stand up transmission infrastructure to get those electrons from where they're produced to where they're ultimately needed. And that's generally served us very, very well until we get to a place where it gets hard to build infrastructure. Where you have people who don't want a high voltage power line in their backyard, and so they start to stand up and say, "I'm not okay with that." And so as a result, we've had a very, very hard time in this country building infrastructure to move electrons around the country. We've also not built much thermal generation in the last little while. And so we saw a real opportunity there. The National Electricity Reliability Council, I think that's what it is, NERC has come out and talked about the fragility of our grid in a number of areas here on the East coast up along the Great Lakes down in Texas. And that's coming in combination with this immense growth in power demand.
What has historically been a pretty flat industry for the last couple of decades is now expected to grow at two or 3% on an annual basis for the next number of years as we reshore manufacturing, as we add data centers to our world, as we race down the path of AI. And that has meant an incredible need for power. But more than that, an incredible need for power in a very short period of time. People can stand a data center up in 12 months and if the grid can't respond to that for three or four years, that puts us in a real hole. And so at Liberty, we saw a real opportunity to step into that space to bring what I'd consider a different approach to power generation than the traditional power industry has typically thought about to the table and play an important part in that.
And so we are now talking to partners. DC Grid you named, Hyperscalers on the data center side of things, remote mining opportunities as we look to reshore critical minerals mining here, other critical commercial and industrial opportunities. All of whom are looking for power, the ability to grow their business, but weren't able to maybe get that off of the grid, at least in the near term. And so we're excited about those partnerships. We're excited about what that could mean for our business. And what I think it means for Liberty in the long term is that we have a fantastic oil field services business over here that will continue to play an important role in the energy space going forward. And adjacent to that, we're going to build a fantastic power business that I think in six or seven years could easily be the same size as this business.
That's a tremendous opportunity for us to support industries as they're growing, but also if you're an employee at Liberty, to look at the exciting new opportunities that you have. Again, as you think about that culture, the opportunity to grow within an organization, to be promoted, to take on new challenges, seeing this whole new exciting opportunity arise over here. Fantastic and I couldn't be more thrilled for the Liberty team.
Kristen Scholer:
I do, Ron, want to turn more to artificial intelligence now. I know you've mentioned it throughout our conversation here on the podcast and you've shared how Liberty Energy really does pride itself in terms of staying at the forefront of new technologies, with AI of course being one of the most transformative. How is Liberty integrating AI into its platform to reduce costs and improve efficiency?
Ron Gusek:
Yes, that's an important question and one that I don't know that we fully understand the true possibilities of yet. It's a conversation that's happening a lot in our industry today. I already mentioned our logistics platform and what is going on there, but there are a meaningful number of opportunities for that. I'd point to equipment operation as a really big one for us. So we run probably 1500 pieces of rotating equipment out in the field every day, spread all over the country. We have a real opportunity to take the operation of those to the next level. Historically, we used to look at them individually out on location. We have a mechanic and electronics technician out there who are keeping an eye on the equipment on their location and the team that's operating that. And of course they're making the best decisions they can with the tools they have at hand to use that equipment as effectively as possible to look after that equipment as well as possible.
But we're now able to provide an additional level of support there. Again, if you came to Colorado and visited our tech center, you could come and visit a room that we call the Hive. And there are a team of people in there 24 7 monitoring a massive incoming data stream from all of our assets all over the world. And behind the scenes is a layer of artificial intelligence that's overseeing the diagnostics, I guess would be the best word of that equipment. And so of course in our past, we've had equipment fail for this reason or that reason, but we have a data set that led up to that. And now with artificial intelligence, we have the ability to look at that data set and to find that indicator, that little change that suggested something's about to happen. We didn't see it ourselves, but an algorithm can find those sorts of things.
And so today we have AI watching all of our equipment looking for those precursors to a maintenance issue, looking for opportunities to run that asset a little more efficiently to burn a little less fuel, whatever the case might be. We track thousands and thousands of variables every second now. You could never do that with the human eye, but you can do that with AI. And what that means in terms of the cost of operating our business and ultimately our cost of providing a service to our customers is incredibly positive. And as we think about being competitive on the global stage as a player in the energy space, that's what enables us, both our customers, us and our supply chain partners, to have a view to longevity in this business and confidence that we are going to be players in it for the long term.
Kristen Scholer:
I do want to talk about a little over a year ago in January 2024, Liberty Energy launched the Bettering Human Lives Foundation with the goal of increasing access to clean cooking fuels in sub-Saharan Africa and 2.3 billion people worldwide. Mostly women and girls rely on harmful fuels for essentials like cooking. What inspired this foundation's creation?
Ron Gusek:
That's truly a wonderful story and goes a long ways back in Chris's life. Chris grew up in Colorado, born in New Jersey, but ultimately relocated there early in life. And he would tell you the story of not too far into his teenage years, walking down the streets of downtown Denver and wondering how in a place so prosperous there could be somebody on the street there struggling in poverty. And since that day, poverty and the challenge around that has been core to Chris's mission in life. We've tackled that primarily through energy. And so our mission at Liberty bettering human lives has been a pretty straightforward one. Whether that's the lives of the people who work at Liberty, the lives of those who work here in North America, and you consume much of the energy we produce here or those globally that we can help lift out of energy poverty. We've sought ways to do that.
It started with a publication of a book called exactly that, called Bettering Human Lives. And the goal of that was to bring a lens to the intersection of energy and poverty and human well-being with the goal of reminding people that energy policy in a place like the United States should not just be a reflection of our situation here, but should contemplate the broader energy needs around the globe, recognizing that we have a group of those who are in the have camp, there are a billion of us on the face of the earth who consume 13 barrels of oil per person per year. Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea, Australia pretty much make up that group. The other 7 billion people on the face of the earth consume three barrels of oil per person per year. They have a dramatic energy deficit.
And at the very extreme case to the point you made, we have a third of humanity who still cooks over a wood or grass or dung-fueled fire. They're inside a hut and they get up at 4:00 in the morning to go out and collect firewood or whatever their fuel source is. They start that fire and they spend the day over top of that fire preparing meals for the family. And of course, the people most impacted by that are the women and children in that house and particularly the girls. So one of the most impactful opportunities that we have that we can literally change overnight is to transition every one of those families from a wood-burning or whatever-burning fire to a clean-burning LPG stove. And so we started last year the Bettering Human Lives Foundation with the goal of helping to enable that transition, not by virtue of a handout, but just like we grow a business here by providing access to capital to entrepreneurs on the ground in these countries who want to grow an LPG distribution business.
And so we are on the ground in Kenya and Ghana right now. We have a number of partners that had built a small business in LPG distribution. We're providing capital to them in the form of a loan that they will ultimately pay back to us that allows them to expand the scale of their business, to distribute more LPG canisters, to transition more families and schools from these very, very polluting cooking environments to a life-changing environment where they quite literally light a match and start a stove and get to cook a meal and the emissions from that are water vapor. So it is quite literally life-changing for these people. We've also found some need to develop some technology to enable that. Many of these families can only afford maybe a dollar a day. And so when they cook on charcoal, they go out that morning and they buy the charcoal for that day's meals.
And so buying a whole canister of propane where that might provide you enough fuel for a month, but require you to lay out the equivalent of $30 or something is very, very difficult for them. And so we found a partner who is working to develop and ultimately manufacture a stove that'll allow them to meter propane one day at a time so they can buy a dollar's worth of propane and it'll meter out a dollar's worth of propane and then the next morning they can do the same thing. So it doesn't change their economic situation at all. It allows them to continue to move ahead on a day-by-day basis just like they had in the past, but with a very, very different health outcome. And ultimately, the beneficiaries of that will be the moms in those families and the children in those families, particularly the girls who will have a very, very different day that won't involve three or four hours of collecting firewood and tending a fire and instead will look a lot more like yours and mine when it comes to warming up a meal.
Kristen Scholer:
I do want to ask Ron more about the Chris Wright confirmation as energy secretary, of course, under President Trump after that, and of course your transition to CEO. In the wake of that Bill Kimball was elected by the board to serve as chair. How will his leadership and guidance help you and the executive team drive continued growth in the years ahead?
Ron Gusek:
Bill's been a tremendous partner on the board since we became a public company. And so Bill and I have become close friends and I'm so grateful for the expertise he brings to the table. I'm an engineer by background. I nerd out on trucks and engines and all of that cool kind of stuff. I am not a finance guy by background, but Bill comes from a very, very different world than me. And so I appreciate having that capability, that expertise, the background that he has as an audit partner and longtime person in a Big Four organization that just brings some thoughtfulness, some real presence, some great questioning to the table that ensures that as we think about heading off on a new path like power generation, that we have thought about all of the things we need to consider there, have asked all those questions and that we're being thoughtful as we begin to deploy that capital.
We've been incredibly strong stewards of our investors capital, I think, on the oil field services side by virtue of the strong board that we have and the great leadership team that we have. I don't want that to change on the power generation side at all and grateful to have Bill's expertise along for the journey as we start down this new path.
Kristen Scholer:
So let's talk more about the path of course, as you look ahead to the rest of President Donald Trump's second term and the Department of Energy under Chris's leadership during that time, what do you see as the potential for the industry over these next four years?
Ron Gusek:
I am excited. There's tremendous opportunity for the industry to continue to excel over this coming timeframe. We need a few things to be able to do that. One of those is certainty. You need to have an understanding as to what the future is going to hold from a regulatory standpoint. We have an administration that is, I think quite focused on that today. That not only wants to remove some of the red tape and maybe impediments that have been in the road of getting infrastructure built, whether that's a pipeline or a power line or LNG export, getting a permit to drill a new well on federal land. They're working to make some changes there to put in place the structure within which we can work, and then to ensure that we have stability in that, such that we can make investment decisions. When Liberty decides to deploy a new asset that's an asset with a 10-year life or maybe more.
And so it's important to us as we think about deploying that capital to have confidence that that business opportunity is going to be there. And while it may have some ups and downs, we're going to have the opportunity to participate in that business for a decade or more. And I think we're seeing that from this administration, and I think you're feeling that in the confidence of the market. You're starting to see that on the natural gas side of things right now. We've had a number of ENPs announce incremental dollars being deployed in their budgets this year, additional rigs coming back to work. And so that gives me excitement for the future and what that ultimately means for Liberty down the road.
Kristen Scholer:
I want to end Ron by asking you more about that excitement. So how are you and your executive team shaping the future of Liberty Energy going forward to ensure that there is still consistent growth and of course maintain your position in the industry?
Ron Gusek:
Yeah, I think there's a few things to look at there. Of course, we started our journey as Liberty Oil Field Services as a company specifically focused on the frack space, and we ultimately evolved that to include wireline and sand mines and vertical integration in manufacturing. And now we're taking that and we're stepping into the power space. We've made investments in small modular nuclear, we've made investments in enhanced geothermal, we've made investments in battery technology, and we are moving into power generation. And so as I think about what the Liberty Energy platform looks like a decade from now, who knows? The sky's the limit. Could we be operating a small modular reactor as part of our power generation business alongside our partners in the ENP space or in the data center space? I don't know, but I'd love to think that that's a real possibility for us. I'm excited about it because I think we have laid the foundation for a huge step forward in our company and the role we can play in the broader energy space both here in North America and ultimately globally.
Kristen Scholer:
What a wonderful conversation. Ron, thank you so much for joining us in inside the Ice House.
Ron Gusek:
It was my pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.
Speaker 1:
That's our conversation for this week. Remember to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you listen and follow us on X at Ice House Podcast. From the New York Stock Exchange, we'll talk to you again next week inside the Ice House. Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither Ice nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties expressed or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information, and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.