The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on June 27 approved a proposal to build an export terminal in Louisiana designed to ship up to 20 million metric tons of liquified natural gas (LNG) a year to overseas buyers’ The proposal had been pending for nearly a year. The green-light comes after the Biden administration in January imposed a “pause” on issuing new LNG export permits as part of a newly fashioned “public interest” review process that won’t be completed until at least January 2025. Chair Willie Phillips, a Democrat, and Commissioner Mark Christie, a Republican, endorsed the order, which affirms FERC’s July 2023 final environmental impact statement (EIS) approval, without comment.
Commissioner Allison Clements, a Democrat in her final meeting as a member of the independent commission appointed by the Senate Natural Resources and Energy Committee, opposed the order. Ms. Clements, in a statement she read into the record, said the EIS does not adequately address the projects’ potential environmental and socioeconomic impacts, claiming they would emit into the atmosphere the “greenhouse gas” equivalent of 1.
8 million gas-fueled cars. Since last July, she said, “there have been important developments that should have been addressed in the supplemental EIS. Instead, the commission relies on updated air pollution impact modeling submitted by Venture Global itself, without giving the public access to the underlying data or any opportunity to comm.
