Editor’s note:  This story was updated at 9:45 M CST, Feb. 6, 2019. Please check back for continuing industry reaction to President Trump’s state of the union address.

President Donald Trump delivered his second state of the union address a week later than originally scheduled on Feb. 5, and this time faced a joint session of Congress with a Democratic majority in the House. The speech also came following the standoff over immigration policy that resulted in the longest government shutdown in U.S. history and with the possibility of another shutdown looming.

While the President focused primarily on immigration during a good portion of his address, he also spent the early part of the 90-minute speech touting the nation’s economic and job growth, including the growing role of the U.S. in the world’s energy markets.

“We have unleashed a revolution in energy,” Trump said to a standing ovation from the Republican side of the aisle. “The United States is now the number one oil and gas producer in the world.”

In its Short-Term Outlook, the U.S. Energy Administration (EIA) on Sept 18, 2018, said “The United States likely surpassed Russia and Saudi Arabia to become the world’s largest crude oil producer earlier this year.”

Trump also said, “For the first time in 65 years we are a net exporter of energy.” His comments were in reference to an EIA report on Dec. 6, 2018, that said the U.S. posted net exports of 4.2 million barrels per day of products such as gasoline and diesel that week. Those numbers, coming three years after the U.S. ended its four-decade ban on oil exports, made the country a net exporter of crude oil and refined products for the time since the EIA began keeping such data in 1991.

Trump credited his administration’s roll back of taxes and regulations as a catalyst for not only boosting the nation’s energy sector, but also its industrial and manufacturing sectors.

The American Energy Alliance immediately responded to the speech with a statement reading, “This evening, President Donald Trump reminded us that the state of American energy is strong. America’s economy is booming, creating a thriving environment for innovation and energy development.

“The enormous resource wealth of the United States is finally being unlocked, lowering prices and improving Americans’ economic well-being. These wins didn’t occur in a vacuum. They happened because America’s energy producers have the know-how and the Trump administration has the resolve to do away with self-inflicted federal red tape that hampered ingenuity and technological progress.”

The group called on the President to make addressing the lack of pipeline capacity a key priority of his 2019 agenda.

GPA Midstream also release commentary alluding to the need for infrastructure saying it plays a crucial role in the nation's energy effort. "I want to commend President Trump and his administration on their efforts to curb unnecessary regulations and to streamline the permit process for the midstream industry. These efforts have helped the midstream industry build out our operations and get our infrastructure projects underway in a more timely and efficient manner," said GPA Midstream President and CEO Mark Sutton in a statement. "GPA Midstream and its member companies stand with the president to help continue to build out our nation's energy infrastructure, which is crucial to all Americans."

Jason Bordoff, founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, and former White House energy advisor to President Obama, tweeted, “Trump is correct the the US is the top producer of oil & natural gas & net exporter. And that’s a remarkable turnaround w significant consequences. It’s not true that this Administration ‘unleashed’ it. Oil & gas surged under Obama & would be now regardless of who’s in WH.”

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The President also talked trade saying his administration is “reversing decades of calamitous trade policies.” He pointed to tariffs imposed on billions of dollars of goods from China, which has since retaliated on a number of American goods that are exported to China including a 10% tariff on LNG.

FactCheck.org, which bills itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit, “consumer advocate” for voters based in Philadelphia, tweeted during the speech that during a 12-month period ending in October the trade deficit was $604 billion, an increase of $102 billion, or 20.2% compared with 2016.  

The U.S. exported more than 1,000 billion cubic feet (Bcf) of LNG in 2018. But China, which purchased about 15% of all U.S. LNG shipped in 2017, bought less than 100 Bcf of U.S. LNG in 2018, according to Thomson Reuters vessel tracking and U.S. Department of Energy data.

Trump also railed against NAFTA and implored Congress to approve the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), often referred to as the new NAFTA.

Trump also said the U.S. “stands with the Venezuelan people” and lambasted socialism saying, “America was founded on liberty and independence…we were born free and will remain free. Tonight we continue our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”

The Trump administration recently recognized Juan Gaido as the president of Venezuela and called Nicolas Maduro’s presidency illegitimate, citing the collapse of the country’s economy.