President-elect Donald Trump said he plans to nominate North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, a one-time rival for the Republican presidential nomination, to run the Interior Department and help steer the energy policy he’s pledged will drive up oil and gas drilling.

“We’re going do things with energy and with land — Interior — that is going to be incredible,” Trump told an audience at Mar A Lago. Bergum “is going to head the Department of Interior and he’s going to be fantastic.”

Burgum became wealthy from selling his software company, a factor that helped him create a relationship with Trump, who considered Burgum as a potential 2024 running mate.

If confirmed by the Senate, Burgum would manage the more than 500 million acres of federal land as well as the fossil fuels and minerals that lie beneath the surface — making him a critical component in Trump’s promise to boost oil and gas output.

Burgum will have a part in crafting policies that deliver on Trump’s promise to “drill, baby, drill”: leasing out federal land for oil, natural gas and coal development and setting safety standards for offshore oil rigs.

But Trump’s love of energy has not extended to renewable energy projects, something which the Biden administration sought to prioritize on public land. Trump is likely to push Burgum to scale back or end many of the Biden efforts to set up vast wind farms off the East Coast and other renewables on public lands.

During Trump’s first term, his administration sought to roll back rules on rig safety, climate change and Endangered Species Act protections in attempts to make things as easy as possible for oil companies to drill on public land. With Trump’s most recent talk of oil being “liquid gold” and that crude production would be four or five times higher under him than Biden, many agency observers expect the former president to look for new ways to remove regulatory speedbumps the current administration has put in place.

North Dakota is the third-largest oil-producing state in the country and also has more than 4 million acres under federal oversight. As governor, Burgum promoted carbon capture technologies to bring down greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel production and other industrial activities.

That approach lends itself to Trump’s vision of boosting fossil fuel production, but also pursuing other technology to reduce environmental degradation, said Collin O’Mara, CEO of environmental group National Wildlife Federation.

“I think he’ll be a very strong champion of the energy dominance agenda,” said O’Mara. “But in North Dakota, he tried to find some level of balance to make sure that important conservation areas, important areas for tourism, weren’t harmed in the process.”

Other environmental groups criticized Trump’s choice, saying Burgum lacked the experience outside the fossil fuel industry to steward the public lands.

In North Dakota, Interior’s Bureau of Land Management oversees 58,000 acres of surface land and 4.1 million acres of mineral estate. BLM has jurisdiction over about 2,500 federal oil and gas leases and has trust responsibility on more than 3,000 on the Fort Berthold Reservation and Turtle Mountain Tracts in the state’s northern region.

“Doug Burgum comes from an oil state, but North Dakota is not a public lands state,” Jennifer Rokala, executive director for the conservation group Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement.

“His cozy relationship with oil billionaires may endear him to Donald Trump, but he has no experience that qualifies him to oversee the management of 20 percent of America’s lands.”

Zack Colman contributed to this report.