Intro

We are excited to share this on-the-road COBT featuring Deputy Secretary Kate MacGregor, Representative Pete Stauber, and Mike Minarovic, CEO of Arena Energy. Deputy Secretary MacGregor first joined the Department of the Interior in 2017, served in senior leadership roles during the first Trump Administration, and returned as Deputy Secretary in 2025 after serving as Vice President of Environmental Services at NextEra Energy. Representative Stauber is serving his fourth term in Congress and serves on the House Natural Resources Committee, where he chairs the Subcommittee on Energy and Mineral Resources, in addition to serving on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee and the Small Business Committee. Last week, our team traveled to one of Arena’s rigs off the coast of Louisiana, where we had the opportunity to tour the facility, meet members of the crew, and sit down for a wide-ranging discussion on energy, minerals, permitting, and the policy landscape shaping the industry.
 
Our conversation with Pete, Kate, and Mike covered the strategic importance of Gulf of America oil and gas production, the role federal lease sales and royalty policy play in driving investment, and the Trump Administration’s push to accelerate permitting and restore regulatory certainty across energy and minerals. We discuss Interior’s central role in shaping U.S. energy policy, how development on public lands generates revenue that is reinvested back into national assets, how those lands are being viewed through both conservation and productive-use lenses, and why regulatory certainty is critical for long-term investment. We explore why domestic mining and critical minerals have become central to national security, how geopolitical instability is reinforcing the need for resilient American energy supply chains, how Gulf production remains physically connected to consumers across the country, and why affordability, reliability, and baseload power have moved back to the center of the policy conversation. We touch on AI’s growing role in upstream operations, Alaska’s renewed development potential, litigation reform, coal’s resurgence in the reliability debate, the workforce culture required to attract and retain skilled talent across the industrial economy, and much much more. We greatly enjoyed the conversation.
 
We can’t thank the Arena team enough for their hospitality and coordination in making this trip happen. We hope you enjoy the conversation as much as we did. And as always, thanks to you all for your friendship and support!