Liberty Energy President and CEO Ron Gusek joined EnerCom to discuss the forces reshaping the energy industry and Liberty’s evolution beyond its traditional oilfield services business. Gusek explores the growth of Liberty Power Innovations, rising power demand from data centers, the company’s expanding use of AI to improve operations, and his outlook for North American energy markets.
What Ron Gusek said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Ron Gusek, CEO of Liberty Energy, discussed the company's evolution from a pure frac service provider into power generation, responding to disruptions in global oil and gas supply and the rise of data center electricity demand. He detailed Liberty's journey into building its own power generation capacity (130-140 megawatts) for electric fleets, leading to the creation of Liberty Power Innovations (LPI). Gusek highlighted AI adoption across the company: optimizing logistics for over a million annual sand truckloads, monitoring equipment to extend component longevity by 75-100%, and deploying agentic AI to run frac jobs, achieving 7 minutes faster per stage. He also discussed the Bettering Human Lives Foundation, launched in 2024, aiming to convert a million homes and a thousand schools in Africa to LPG stoves, working in five countries, and facing more loan requests than capital. Looking ahead, Gusek forecast a flat market in North American lateral feet completed next year, citing commodity price volatility and a forward curve not calling for growth.
Key takeaways
Gusek forecasts flat North American lateral feet completed next year, with cautious outlook until market certainty improves.
AI training has extended equipment component longevity by 75-100%, with agentic AI now executing frac jobs.
Liberty's power generation arm, Liberty Power Innovations (LPI), grew out of building 130-140 megawatts of capacity for its own fleets.
The Bettering Human Lives Foundation, launched in 2024, aims to convert a million homes and a thousand schools in Africa to LPG stoves.
Gusek cited 7 minutes faster per stage as a key benefit from deploying AI in frac operations.
Numbers and commitments
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What it refers to
Type
At
130, 140 megawatts
Power generation capacity developed in-house for Liberty's electric fleets
Yes, pleasure having you today. Talking with the president and CEO of Liberty, Ron Gusek. Ron was here last year to give us an update on the latest here with the company and of course, what a year in oil and gas. And nobody is moving the needle further than you guys are. There's all these macro factors taking place and you guys do some wonderful analysis to share with us today on some of the long-term trends you see forthcoming. So, tell us a little bit. I know that you're moving more into the power generation sphere these days.
Yeah, certainly a lot to unpack there. It has not been the year we might have anticipated when we first got into 2026. It has been a very, very different ride than we thought. But I think for us it has led to some important energy conversations. We've seen a pretty meaningful disruption in oil and gas supply globally. And while I think we've mostly managed to avoid the large impacts of that here in the United States by virtue of the shale revolution, other countries around the world have certainly felt those impacts. And I think that has brought to maybe a more appropriate level a conversation around the importance of energy, the role it plays in human well-being, and just how important North America is as a supplier there. And maybe more importantly, a reliable supplier of that energy. So, for us, of course, gives us I think a lot of excitement around the future of our industry and where oil and gas will be going over time, what that means for the reliance on North American supply both from LNG and crude and even refined products to countries around the world who are net importers of energy, and where that supply is going to come from for them over time.
Right. Right. Now, again, from the origins, it was pretty clear strategy: we are going to be the ones you call when you need a frac job. You guys have responded to a lot of the unforeseen consequences of advancing technology, market trends, regulatory trends. What's the Liberty of today look like compared to just a few years ago?
We've certainly evolved a little bit. We were a purely focused frac company. We were great at that and we wanted to be great at one thing and one thing only. But recognized that of course when opportunities come along, you want to take advantage of those. Chances to have the business evolve to be something greater than it is or was a few years ago. For us that opportunity came in the form of power generation. We had gotten into power generation for ourselves. We started transitioning our fleet over to in some cases an electric fleet. That power was not available out in the remote places that we work in so we found we had to generate it ourselves. That meant that we built a power generation business and a virtual pipeline business to supply the fuel to that. And we grew that to be 130, 140 megawatts of power generation working across a couple of different fleets in remote locations. And then in a bit of our right place at the right time sort of scenario, along comes this need for power generation elsewhere outside oil and gas. Specifically now to support data centers in their incredible demand for electricity as they seek to put more compute to work. And we saw that as something that leveraged much of the skill set and capability we had already built up and as a logical next step for the company. So we're excited now to have LPI, which is our growing power generation arm.
Liberty Power Innovations, yes. Well, I'm convinced that he who owns the most electrons is going to win here in the future going forward. So it looks like you're well poised for that. You had mentioned AI a little bit. Obviously we all know what the demands are forthcoming and they're going to be huge. But you're also leveraging AI inside the company. Can you talk a little bit about that?
We certainly are. We've seen I think a number of opportunities to put AI to work and in each case seen meaningful impact on the bottom line as a result of that. We started in logistics. We move more than a million truckloads of sand on an annual basis. That's a complicated problem and AI trained appropriately does a very, very nice job of optimizing that logistics question. Oversight of our equipment is another big one. Looking for problems in a data stream before they become big problems. So, watching the coolant temperatures and oil temperatures and transmission temperatures and pressures and things like that and being able to see an inflection in that data stream that says, 'I think this is about to happen.' And it can do that because it's been trained on all the problems that we've had in the past, all the challenges we've had with equipment. You can see that before a human can. It's meant that we've seen longevity of components go up by 75 to 100%.
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Gusek, R. (2026, September 28). EnerCom Interview with Ron Gusek, CEO and President of Liberty Energy [Interview transcript]. Oil and Gas 360 - EnerCom. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2971416/
MLA
Ron Gusek. "EnerCom Interview with Ron Gusek, CEO and President of Liberty Energy." Oil and Gas 360 - EnerCom, 28 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2971416/.
BibTeX
@misc{gusek2026_2971416,
author = {Ron Gusek},
title = {EnerCom Interview with Ron Gusek, CEO and President of Liberty Energy},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Oil and Gas 360 - EnerCom. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2971416/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
