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Wright With Lara Trump: $2 Billion SPARK Grid Program, Refining Shortage and Hormuz Flows

September 28, 2026 · U.S. Department of Energy · 0:07:41

Embedded from the source channel — never re-uploaded. Watch on YouTube

What happened

Energy Secretary Chris Wright joined Lara Trump on Fox News in a segment recorded September 26, 2026 and posted September 28, according to the Department of Energy’s recording, rendered in Arabic-rendered auto-captions and paraphrased here. Wright said President Trump has focused on increasing U.S. oil, natural gas and refining production, but that two world crises — the Russia-Ukraine war and the Middle East conflict — have cut refined-product supply. He said Russian refining output is down sharply, by about 40 percent as he stated it, that more than a dozen U.S. refineries closed during the Biden administration, and that Governor Newsom forced two more California closures in the past 12 months, leaving refining capacity as the biggest driver of gasoline and diesel prices.

Wright announced the department’s SPARK program, which he described as a $2 billion Department of Energy investment plus more than $3 billion in private investment to increase the throughput of the nation’s electricity grid. He said the program will affect more than 100 million Americans and lower electricity bills by getting more power out of existing facilities through transmission upgrades. On artificial intelligence, he said winning the AI race against China and reshoring manufacturing will require tens and possibly hundreds of gigawatts of new generating capacity, from natural gas, retained coal plants, restarted and new nuclear plants, and next-generation geothermal.

Wright said the administration stopped the closure of more than 30 gigawatts of coal generation, that the U.S. now produces more oil than Russia and Saudi Arabia combined and more natural gas than Iran, Russia and China combined, and that America is a massive net energy exporter with the lowest gasoline, diesel and home-heating gas prices in the world, as he presented the figures. On the Strait of Hormuz, he said U.S. forces have kept oil, gas, products and fertilizer moving, with more than 20 million barrels flowing on one day the previous week and a current daily average of about 13 million barrels, and he said the pricing problem today is refining capacity more than crude flows. He said building a refinery had been effectively impossible under prior regulation and that the administration is building the first new U.S. refinery in decades, as he described the project.

Why it matters

Wright’s account identifies refining capacity, not crude supply, as the administration’s stated bottleneck for fuel prices, and SPARK is its grid-side counterpart — both are the deliverables the department will be measured against as AI power demand grows.

Sources: U.S. Department of Energy, “Secretary Wright Joins Lara Trump on Fox News—September 26, 2026”, 2026-09-28 (official upload, embedded above; published 2026-09-28). Transcript via Supadata (private research store, paraphrased and attributed, not republished). All figures and characterizations as stated by the speakers.