Embargoed Until October 5, 2026

NATIONAL AND GLOBAL ENERGY LEADERS TO GATHER IN 

PENNSYLVANIA'S OIL REGION FOR 5TH ANNUAL DRAKE DIALOGUES

U.S. Under Secretary of Energy Kyle Haustveit, API President and CEO Mike Sommers, Daniel Yergin, Senator David McCormick, Ambassador Khazar Ibrahim, and leading energy executives will convene in Oil City and Titusville October 19–20.

OIL CITY, Pennsylvania — Senior U.S. officials, energy executives, diplomats, policymakers, and experts will gather in Oil City and Titusville, Pennsylvania, October 19–20, 2026, for the fifth annual Drake Dialogues, a national energy forum held in the birthplace of the modern oil industry.

Convened by the nonprofit Drake Energy Forum, this year’s Dialogues, Energy Affordability and the New Economic Geography, will examine how energy costs and availability, rising electricity demand, artificial intelligence and data centers, advanced manufacturing, infrastructure constraints, and global competition are reshaping where economic growth and investment occur.

The 2026 program will feature Kyle Haustveit, U.S. Under Secretary of Energy, as keynote speaker, joined by Mike Sommers, President and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute. Daniel Yergin, Vice Chairman of S&P Global and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Prize, and U.S. Senator David McCormick of Pennsylvania will participate virtually.

Other confirmed participants include:

• Khazar Ibrahim, Ambassador of the Republic of Azerbaijan to the United States

• Maryann Mannen, President, CEO and Chairman, Marathon Petroleum

• Steven C. Rockefeller, Jr., Chairman and CEO, Rose Rock Group

• Sarah Fenton, Vice President, EQT Corporation

• R. Lee James, Pennsylvania House of Representatives, 64th District

Additional speakers from government, industry, technology, academia, and international institutions will be announced in the coming weeks.

Energy Affordability and the New Economic Geography

The 2026 Dialogues come as rapidly growing electricity demand, data centers, reshoring, and advanced manufacturing are placing new pressure on U.S. energy infrastructure. At the same time, competition over energy resources, LNG, critical minerals, supply chains, and infrastructure is increasingly shaping global economic and strategic relationships.

Discussions will focus on the changing geography of American economic growth; whether energy infrastructure can keep pace with new demand; global competition for energy advantage; the renewed importance of energy-producing states and regions; and lessons from communities that have experienced energy-driven economic transformation.

The setting is central to those discussions. Beginning with Edwin Drake’s 1859 well near Titusville, Northwestern Pennsylvania helped launch the modern petroleum industry and experienced firsthand the extraordinary economic opportunities—as well as the environmental, infrastructure, and boom-and-bust challenges—created by rapid energy development.

The Drake Dialogues bring national and international leaders to the region to consider what that history can teach about the next transformation of the energy economy.

From Oil City to Drake Well

The Dialogues will begin October 19 in Oil City, with programming at historic sites including Standard Oil’s National Transit Building and the Venango Museum of Art, Science and Industry.

On October 20, the gathering moves to Drake Well Museum & Park in Titusville, where Under Secretary Haustveit will deliver the keynote and join API President and CEO Mike Sommers for a discussion of American energy, affordability, investment, and economic growth.

The program will also continue the Forum’s relationship with Azerbaijan, another historic center of the early petroleum industry. Ambassador Khazar Ibrahim will participate in the gathering as part of ongoing exchanges between the Pennsylvania Oil Region and Baku. Oil City and Baku established a sister-city relationship in 2023.

About the Drake Energy Forum

The Drake Energy Forum is a nonprofit organization based in Oil City, Pennsylvania, dedicated to fostering informed discussion about energy, the economy, the environment, and national and international security.

Through the annual Drake Dialogues, the Forum brings community leaders together with policymakers, executives, diplomats, scholars, and experts in the birthplace of the modern petroleum industry to discuss contemporary energy challenges and opportunities.

Media Access

Members of the media interested in covering the 2026 Drake Dialogues or arranging interviews with participating speakers should contact the Drake Energy Forum. Additional program and speaker announcements will be released ahead of the event.

MEDIA CONTACT
Drake Energy Forum
Oil City, Pennsylvania
info@drakeenergysecurity.org
DrakeForum.org

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https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/U.S.-elections-2024/Trump-and-Harris-camps-clash-over-energy-transition-with-eye-on-Asia

U.S. elections 2024

Trump and Harris camps clash over energy transition, with eye on Asia

Republicans say Democratic green energy policies 'handcuff' economy to China

U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and former U.S. President Donald Trump have decidedly different takes on energy transition.  © Reuters

KEN MORIYASU, Nikkei Asia diplomatic correspondent

October 22, 2024 18:00 JST

TITUSVILLE, Pennsylvania -- With two weeks to go before the U.S. presidential election, the campaign of former President Donald Trump is highlighting its differences with Vice President Kamala Harris on energy, especially in the crucial battleground state of Pennsylvania, a leading natural gas producer.

Trump maintains that Harris wants to ban hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which involves the use of highly pressurized blasts of water and chemicals to extract natural gas and oil from subterranean rocks. The vice president, who backed a ban during her unsuccessful campaign for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, now says she would allow the practice.

Pennsylvania sits atop a rock formation called the Marcellus Shale, estimated to hold trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. Trump, a Republican, has vowed to accelerate the drilling of oil and gas and use the revenue to pay down the U.S. debt and cut taxes. Critics say fracking contributes to climate change and releases chemical compounds that are harmful to the human body.

Since the beginning of October, Trump's campaign has run a TV ad titled "Give a frack" in Pennsylvania and Michigan, slamming Harris' previous support for a ban on fracking. Her policies will lead to new taxes, higher gas prices and job losses, the ad says.

During a rally in the Pennsylvania city of Latrobe on Saturday, Trump returned to the theme, saying: "Starting on Day 1 of my new administration, I will end Kamala Harris' war on Pennsylvania energy."

The Harris presidential campaign released a statement on Oct. 1 saying Trump's energy policies would let polluters "write their own rules," benefiting Big Oil at the expense of the American people and allowing other countries to charge ahead with "clean energy innovation."

A Harris administration "would create good-paying clean-energy jobs and secure America's energy independence," it said.

Energy was not among the leading topics of either campaign's ads until recently. Republicans had focused on inflation, the economy, housing, immigration and crime, according to AdImpact, an analytics firm that tracks political advertising.

The Republican stance on energy also mixes in geopolitics.

At the Drake Energy Security Forum held last week in Titusville, the birthplace of the U.S. oil industry, conservative panelists took particular aim at President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, which promotes electric vehicles and the use of renewables.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Center for Energy, Climate and Environment at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said the IRA would instead increase inflation through higher energy prices and "handcuff" the U.S. to China because that country is home to the top makers of solar power plants and wind turbines, as well as EV battery producers.

Brenda Shaffer, a faculty member of the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and a political independent, said that if the U.S. abandons fossil fuel too quickly, "we're voluntarily making our own electricity more expensive, less reliable [and] more dependent on our enemies for the inputs to this new energy system."

American energy policy needs to consider the recent alignment of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, she said. This alignment addresses key strategic weaknesses of the U.S. rivals, such as China's dependence on imported energy and the susceptibility of Russia and Iran to sanctions.

"This alliance between Russia, China, Iran and North Korea solves all the problems," Shaffer said. "China not only gets uninhibited access to Russian and Iranian oil, but thanks to our sanctions on Russia and Iran, it gets it at a discount."

Similarly, sanctions have little effect on Russia and Iran because they have access to the huge Chinese market, she said.

Harris, who cast the tiebreaking vote in the Senate in 2022 to pass the IRA, has called the legislation "the single largest climate investment in American history."

Sarah Bianchi, a former deputy U.S. trade representative in the Biden administration, said in a recent visit to South Korea that the IRA will end up being one of the most important laws in U.S. economic history, "but that doesn't mean that every day it feels like a clear win for everyone."

Bianchi, now a chief strategist for international political affairs and public policy at investment banking advisory firm Evercore, said though Democrats could point to "new investments, new factories, new jobs," they also need to respond to Trump's attempts to fuel anxiety, particularly in battleground states like Pennsylvania.

"There ... needs to be a sensitivity because transitions are bumpy for certain segments, and this one will be, too," she said.

During a seminar at American University in Washington on Thursday, Daniel Fiorino, the university's director of the Center for Environmental Policy, said the Harris campaign is "being cautious about climate and energy" as it seeks to win Pennsylvania.

"There is this perception that dealing with climate mitigation means higher energy prices," he said. "A lot of climate advocates are giving her room, because they realize the alternative is catastrophic for climate change."

Trump has vowed to impose a moratorium on new spending under Biden-led bills such as the Inflation Reduction Act. But whether Trump would seek a repeal of the IRA is debatable.

At the Drake forum, Robert Johnston, senior director of research at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, said a "reform" of the law would be more likely, because many of the battery investments spurred by the IRA are clustered in Republican states of the Rust Belt and the Southeast.

"If you look at some of the states that are going to be 'red' states and have strong Republican support, they are benefiting from some of these projects, which will certainly add complexity to any potential repeal," he said.

Additional reporting by Steven Borowiec in Seoul