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Last year, after an exhaustive and comprehensive process, the Department of Energy released an updated analysis that underpins its public interest determination. The study, which was released as final, is used to weigh whether or not to approve an application to export liquefied methane gas, known as LNG, to non-Free Trade Agreement countries. Following the release of the study, the agency opened a comment period that ended this week.
Industry and energy market experts, environmentalists, consumer advocates, and impacted communities have all weighed in, sharing studies, data, and personal impacts with the national laboratories that worked on the data-driven update.
Based on the update, any objective observer would have a hard time saying new LNG exports are in the public interest, even by the standards of the Trump administration.
LNG export facilities decimate local industries, like fishing, making it hard for people to make a living. Increased gas exports spur more fracking, only for that energy to be sent overseas, leaving American communities to deal with polluted air and water from the dangerous extraction process. And many studies show that not only do LNG exports crowd out renewables in global markets, but, on top of that, the lifecycle emissions are even worse than coal.
Even if Trump’s administration does not think those impacts are bad enough, there is one piece highlighted in the new study that alone should warrant rejecting new LNG export applications if Trump actually wants to lower costs for Americans.
In a statement alongside the release of the updated study, Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary at the time, highlighted DOE’s conclusion that LNG exports lead to a “triple-cost increase to U.S. consumers.”
This is a fact we have known for some time, though, despite it only recently being reflected in the study used to review export applications.
The United States is currently the biggest exporter of LNG in the world, after only starting the practice in 2016, and this has changed our domestic energy markets. Companies make huge profits from selling gas overseas and those exports directly contribute to higher-than-ever energy bills, while also trickling down to increase costs of other necessary goods for families, from food to fertilizer.
In the latest energy outlook released by the US Energy Information Administration, the agency said it expects the price of gas per unit to increase by more than $2 above 2024 levels by 2026, “as global demand for…[LNG] grows” and new US export facilities come online. In 2023, using EIA data, Public Citizen found that domestic consumers will face $14.3 billion in higher annual energy costs in 2050 due to LNG exports.
Proponents of expanded LNG exports have tried cynically to use current events, like inflation or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to justify plans for a massive expansion of fossil fuel development that would keep us locked into using dirty energy for decades to come.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the price of gas in the US reached its highest point since 2008, causing US consumers to face a 37% increase in their gas bills from just two years earlier. As long as we rely on volatile global commodities like oil and gas, we’ll always be vulnerable to geopolitical dynamics and the whims of greedy fossil fuel executives and the politicians they finance.
Gas consumption in Europe began to decline in 2022 and continued on a downward trend. Since 2023, the United States has been Europe’s largest LNG supplier, providing about one-half of all its LNG imports. At the same time, European imports of Russian gas have plummeted: in 2023, Europe imported 89% less Russian gas via pipeline than it had in 2021. There isn’t much further for that supply to drop, indicating that there is no new “Russian gas gap” that US LNG would need to fill, especially as Europe continues its policies to reduce gas consumption.
The truth is that building more export infrastructure will not help our European allies quickly transition away from Russian fossil fuels. US LNG export terminals take 3-5 years to build once they have their permits and financing in hand, which will do nothing to help Europe in the short term.
In fact, the International Energy Agency projects that, in a climate-stable world, or at the very least a world where current climate commitments are kept, LNG demand through 2050 can be met entirely by projects existing today – and in fact, some existing LNG infrastructure would not be fully utilized. The Department of Energy’s recent study similarly found that there are already more approved US LNG exports than needed in all but one of the scenarios they looked at. This means that expanded US LNG export facilities might not be absorbed into the market and facilities could become stranded assets.
Stranded assets are not just damaging to the communities that suffered the impacts of the construction and get stuck with an abandoned facility. In states like Louisiana and Texas, they are also a massive waste of taxpayer funds that could go to sorely needed resources like healthcare or education. A report by Sierra Club and partners shows that billions of state taxpayer dollars go to LNG companies in the form of tax breaks.
The bottom line is oil and gas CEOs are hatching plans to keep on making record profits by selling US-produced energy overseas – and Americans are footing the bill.
The Trump administration has already given an export approval extension to Golden Pass LNG and a conditional approval to CP2 LNG and seems inclined, based on various executive orders, to let their fossil fuel funders do whatever they want despite the harm to the American people.
Still, the American people deserve the truth. The harms of expanded LNG exports will be felt by us all, including in our wallets.