Last week, thousands of people gathered in Houston, Texas for CERAWeek 2025, perhaps the most significant annual meet-up of the network of oil executives, investors, consultants, government officials, and more, that make up and support the fossil fuel industry.
Inside the gathering, oil, finance, and tech executives joined a slew of panels discussing a range of energy industry topics. Top Trump officials spoke, including US Energy Secretary Chris Wright and US Interior secretary Doug Burgum. According to Guardian climate reporter Dharna Noor, “Wright said global warming was merely a needed “side-effect” of modernization, while Burgum called to “take our natural resources and turn them into natural assets.”
Meanwhile, outside CERAWeek, hundreds of climate activists protested the conference’s display of billionaire power and celebration of fossil fuels, with several activists arrested.
What is CERAWeek, anyways? Who or what is the power behind CERAWeek? What functions does CERAWeek perform for the fossil fuel industry power structure? Who were some of the key billionaires at CERAWeek? This primer will address these questions.
What Is CERAWeek?
CERAWeek is a massive, transnational gathering of powerful people tied to the energy industry, including top fossil fuel executives, big financial investors, and high-level government officials and regulators.
The Houston Chronicle — newspaper of the fossil fuel capital of the US, where CERAWeek is held — has labelled the event the “Super Bowl of energy,” awash with “energy insiders.” Climate activist Bill McKibben has referred to it as “the hydrocarbon world’s biggest festival, a Davos for carbon.”
CERAWeek performs several functions for the energy industry. These include serving as a space to discuss and debate industry trends; engage in networking and dealmaking; hold high-level conversations between executives, investors and regulators; and broadly, to promote and legitimize the industry with a high-profile event.
Thousands of participants attend CERAWeek. In 2023, around 7,200 people from 90 countries flocked to the event. It claims to be rated among the top five “corporate leader conferences” worldwide.
Leaders from the highest heights of politics and industry attend CERAWeek. Past speakers have included Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Justin Trudeau, Narendra Modi, Henry Kissinger to Bill Gates.
This year, new Trump Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum were speakers, along with CEOs or other top executives of fossil fuel companies that span the gamut of the industry, from Big Oil giants to LNG export companies, oil pipeline corporations to utilities. Some of these include ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Oxy, BP, Cheniere, Pioneer, Enbridge, NRG, EQT, Baker Hughes, Hunt Energy, Williams Companies, Hess, NextEra, National Grid, and Freeport LNG — just to name a few.
Harold Hamm of Continental Resources — maybe the industry’s closest ally to Donald Trump — was a speaker. Top leaders from industry groups like American Petroleum Institute, American Gas Association and Edison International attended.
Critically, major Wall Street investors and tech giants also attended CERAWeek. These include asset managers like BlackRock, private equity firms like Carlyle, Apollo, and Blackstone, and tech corporations like Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet (the parent company of Google).
Nor is CERAWeek a solely U.S. affair. Government and corporate representatives from countries all over the world — Saudi Arabia to Canada, Turkey to Nigeria, South Korea to Kuwait — attended as well.
Who Rules CERAWeek?
While CERAWeek is filled with industry representatives, it’s dominated by major corporate players. Different “Partners” sponsor the conference, presumably through hefty fees, and the biggest sponsors gain the most access and power in shaping the event’s tone and content.
For example, according to the sponsorship brochure from the 2024 CERAWeek conference, the highest level of sponsorship, which is limited to just a few corporations and firms, is “Foundational.”
These sponsors “benefit from the highest levels of access, visibility, and executive support” and “play a leadership role within the CERAWeek community and are provided premier engagement and contribution.” Foundational Partners also “may collaborate with CERAWeek to develop a customized Special Program or community aligned with specific objectives.”
This year’s Foundational Partners were Chevron, Amazon, and BlackRock, as well as professional services firm Marsh McLennan and the coal company Xcoal.
The next level of Partners are “Strategic,” which “supports active engagement and access across a wide range of the CERAWeek community.” Among other things, Strategic Partners’ “objectives are supported by the CERAWeek Steering Committee,” and these Partners “receive priority consideration to contribute content and access to CERAWeek Private Communities.
Strategic Partners for CERAWeek 2025 included ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, EQT, Freeport LNG, NextEra, Carlyle Group, Microsoft, and dozens more.
Notably, a major power player behind CERAWeek is Daniel Yergin, a Pulitzer-prize winning author who helped found the conference over four decades ago and serves as chairman of CERAWeek and Vice Chairman of S&P Global, the well-known financial services company that runs CERAWeek (read more on Yergin below).
The Fossil Fuel Industry, the Houston Power Elite & the Houston Police Foundation
The power elite of Houston is deeply intertwined with the fossil fuel industry. Energy companies dominate the board of the city’s main chamber of commerce, the Greater Houston Partnership, making up around a quarter of its membership. Houston is one of the fossil fuel corporate headquarters of the world, home to key global and regional offices of many numerous companies including ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Phillips 66, Occidental, and many others.
The fossil fuel industry also has a close relationship with the Houston Police Department through the Houston Police Foundation, a non-profit that channels corporate donations to city police. Oil billionaires like Jeffery Hildebrand sit on the Houston Police Foundation board, and the foundation helps fund police programs, including the Mounted Patrol that aided attacks on climate activists during CERAWeek.
In fact, oil companies like Chevron, Shell and Valero sponsor individual Mounted Patrol horses. (For more on police foundations and their ties to the fossil fuel industry, check out our 2020 story and our 2021 report coauthored with Color of Change).
CERAWeek and the Fossil Fuel Industry Power Structure
CERAWeek performs several roles within the fossil fuel industry and wider energy power structure.
Legitimizing the Fossil Fuel Industry
While CERAWeek ultimately functions as a show of force for the fossil fuel industry and a space for it to hash things out, it has a veneer of legitimizing wonkiness and expertise.
CERAWeek was founded by Daniel Yergin in the early 1980s, a decorated author who has carved out a space as a benign interlocutor between the fossil fuel industry and civil society — an author with intellectual bona fides who has deep and direct personal ties to the corporate energy world.
Yergin has numerous influential ties to academic institutions, like MIT and Columbia University, and government-aligned think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Brookings Institution. He has authored several well-known books about the fossil fuel industry — most notably his award-winning The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power — while also serving on advisory boards and boards of directors of key industry groups and think tanks worldwide.
Over his career, Yergin has run high-profile energy consulting firms and serves as a Senior Advisor with private equity giant Carlyle Group (a “Strategic Partner” of CERAWeek that is also a major fossil fuel investor).
All told, the spectacle of a massive, public-facing conference, well covered by the media, celebrating and discussing the energy industry and its fossil fuel giants, all given a wonkish gloss by analysts, academics and consultants, provides cover for an industry whose core operations are widely known to be driving climate chaos.
Networking, Schmoozing, Dealmaking
Gatherings like CERAWeek are critical sites for industry networking. CERAWeeks says it convenes “over 450 C-Suite executives, 80 ministers and top officials, and 325 media representatives.”
Participants chat, schmooze and socialize behind closed doors or at any number of extended Happy Hours. This helps build and cultivate relationships and allows for conversations that lead to new contracts, deals, positions, and so on.
At CERAWeek, this networking is all the more important because many high-level representatives of government and international companies are attending. The energy priorities that are hashed out through these conversations — the formal panels, and also the backroom discussion — can have deep implications for global energy policy and geopolitics (one of the event’s themes).
Taking Stock of Industry Trends and Fractions
CERAWeek’s huge numbers and ambitious agenda also present a moment for taking stock of the energy industry’s present and its future. Conference themes explore the gamut of areas within the corporate energy world. This year’s themes included Policy and Regulation, Oil and Gas, Power, Grid and Electrification, Trade and Supply Chains, Business Strategies, Minerals and Mining, Technology and Innovation, and more.
Different fractions of the energy industry, some aspiring, can also use CERAWeek to make their case. “AI and Digital,” for example, is a conference theme this year.
The rise of data centers needed to power AI has strengthened the nexus between the fossil fuel industry, Big Tech, and financial investors, at the expense of a green energy transition.
The event is also filled with the world’s top private equity firms and asset managers, who remain not only wedded to fossil fuels but retreated from previous net zero commitments – indeed, Finance (“The Capital Transition”) was a theme of CERAWeek this year.
Greenwashing
CERAWeek is also a performance in greenwashing. The fossil fuel industry today is simultaneously doubling down on its core business of oil and gas extraction and production while also giving lip service to concerns over carbon emissions and seeking to capture and profit from false solutions like carbon capture and hydrogen.
CERAWeek allows the fossil fuel industry to do both these things. The conference is dominated by fossil fuel giants who are currently racing to drill and burn more oil and gas, but also to gobble up subsidies and produce hydrogen plants — falsely promoting hydrogen as a climate “solution.”
Indeed, CERAWeek 2025 included themes like “Managing Emissions,” “Climate and Sustainability,” and “Hydrogen and Low-Carbon Fuels.” But as Kate Aronoff reported on a previous CERAWeek: “There’s some people involved with copper and lithium and various things, but the main focus is oil and gas, and with a pretty specific focus within oil and gas on some of the bigger companies.”
CERAWeek’s Billionaires
Among the most powerful people at CERAWeek are a slew of oil billionaires, tech titans, and fossil fuel financiers who, whether they show up in person, stand to benefit from the discussions and deal-making that occur at the gathering. Among these are:
- Harold Hamm, worth $18.5 billion, who is the founder, chairman and CEO of Continental Resources, a top ten U.S. independent oil producer. Hamm, who mobilized industry support for Trump’s reelection, may be the key liaison between the fossil fuel industry and the Trump administration. Hamm celebrated Trump’s inauguration by hosting “an exclusive fossil fuel industry celebration on Inauguration Day” whose guests included Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, according to The New York Times. Hamm was a speaker at CERAWeek 2025.
- Larry Fink, worth $1.2 billion, who is the founder, chairman, and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager and a top “Foundational Partner” of CERAWeek 2025. BlackRock is a top shareholder of nearly every publicly-traded fossil fuel company, and Fink may be the most influential CEO on Wall Street. BlackRock was a top sponsor of CERAWeek and, as Dharna Noor of the Guardian reported, Fink wore a silicone bracelet at the gathering that read “make energy great again” — a far cry from his lip service to climate change just a few years ago. Fink was also a speaker at CERAWeek.
- David Rubenstein, worth $3.8 billion, who is a cofounder and co-executive chairman of private equity giant Carlyle Group, a “Strategic Partner” sponsor of CERAWeek which has numerous fossil fuel holdings. Even when it sold off a hefty portfolio of gas-fired power plants in late 2024, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project said that Carlyle was “perpetuating the climate crisis” by offloading them “rather than responsibly transitioning the assets to clean energy generation or retiring and remediating the damage caused by the assets.”
- Jeff Bezos, the founder and executive chairman of Amazon worth $214 billion, whose Amazon Web Services was a top “Foundational Partner” of CERAWeek. Amazon and other tech companies that oversee cloud infrastructure stand to profit from the technification of everything and especially the AI boom. As journalist Kate Aronoff writes: “Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta all control cloud computing infrastructure that’s poised to benefit from the energy-intensive vision of AI development these developers are pushing.”
Hundreds of Climate Activists Protest CERAWeek
Recognizing the opportunity to disrupt mainstream messaging about CERAWeek, and to confront the fossil fuel industry and lift up the stories of frontline communities fighting fossil fuel infrastructure, dozens of climate justice groups participated in coordinated days of actions protesting CERAWeek. Hundreds of elders, young people, and residents of rural areas and cities, marched to demand an end to fossil fuels and accountability of wealthy polluters.
Activists specifically focused on the build out of methane gas (also known by euphemism “liquified natural gas”) export terminals along the Gulf South. These export terminals rely on transporting fracked gas via pipelines and have notoriously imperiled local communities due to toxic air releases, overdrawing water resources, and destroying precious marine habitats. In June of 2022, the Freeport LNG terminal actually exploded, sending a 450-foot ball of fire and pollutants into the air, shaking the houses of nearby residents.
Freeport LNG’s CEO, billionaire Michael Smith, was a featured speaker at CERAWeek, stating that methane gas was “necessary,” echoing other speakers’ sentiments which downplayed the urgent need for renewable energy sources.
At the culmination of the march, eight frontline and Indigenous activists and allies sat in the intersection in front of the CERAWeek conference. The Houston Police Department violently attacked these activists with Mounted Patrol horses before conducting arrests.
As noted above, major oil and gas corporations sponsor these horses, underscoring the tight and varied relationships between policing and the energy industry to suppress struggles against fossil fuels.
CERAWeek, an extravagant display of billionaire power and the convergence of the fossil fuel industry, government, tech and finance, stood in stark contrast to those in the march — everyday people fighting for clean water and air in their hometowns, sovereignty for Indigenous communities, an end to extractive energy systems, and a liveable future for generations to come.
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