Natural gas plans on Texas coast anger locals, green groups

Environmentalists and local residents are sounding the alarm after the Biden administration approved two new liquefied natural gas terminals for the Texas coast.

The administration has billed the expansion of natural gas exports as a means both to help allies decarbonize and maintain U.S. influence in global energy markets.

But local communities say that they’re being sacrificed for geopolitics, and environmental organizations argue that the Biden administration is neglecting the need for rapid climate action.

“It doesn’t matter what mitigation Rio Grande LNG does, we are against it,” Jim Chapman of local group Save RGV [Rio Grande Valley] told news site myRGV.com this month, referring to one of the two projects.

“There’s no mitigation that will make up for the harm that it’s going to do. Other than construction jobs, which go away, Rio Grande LNG is bringing nothing good to the Valley,” Chapman added.

The decision over whether to permit the Texas LNG and Rio Grande LNG export terminals divided the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which in March held a roundtable on the need for more consultation from communities in the path of polluting infrastructure.

“This procedural corner-cutting represents a gobsmacking departure, frankly, from the lessons I took away from the environmental justice roundtable we held just a month ago,” Commissioner Allison Clements said, as reported by the Houston Chronicle.

A FERC majority, however, disagreed.

“Today’s order takes an unprecedented and bipartisan step to protect environmental justice communities from potential concerns about the project’s effect on air quality,” Chairman Willie Phillips said.

NextDecade plans to make a final investment decision by the end of June, according to Natural Gas Intel.

The Sierra Club has announced it will push FERC for a second hearing on the projects, which could lead to further delays.

“The FERC and fossil fuel corporations are forcing dangerous gas plants on the Rio Grande Valley that do nothing to help our community so fossil fuel corporations can profit,” Rebekah Hinojosa, a local representative for the Club, said in a statement.

“We are disappointed, but unfortunately not surprised, that FERC has failed us again,” Hinojosa added.

The FERC ruling this week comes amid rising social divisions along the Gulf Coast, where the region’s fishing, shrimping and tourist industries see the gas expansion as an existential threat. 

That anti-gas alliance was dealt a serious setback in January, when the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Army Corps of Engineers had chosen “the least environmentally damaging” option for the 1.5 square mile Rio Grande LNG plant, as well as the pipelines that connect to it.

No one, including FERC, thinks that “least damaging” means no damage. 

“We determined that the construction and operation of the Texas LNG Project would result in adverse environmental impacts,” FERC members wrote in a March environmental impact statement for that project.

In combination with the Rio Grande LNG project, the new construction would result in “significant cumulative impacts,” which include greater murkiness and coastal erosion in the ship channel and habitat loss for federally protected ocelots and falcons.

However, FERC believes that NextDecade’s proposed mitigation plans would reduce those impacts to “less than significant levels” for all concerned except those around “visual resources” — a technical term for the open ocean and coastal vistas that a natural gas export terminal would interrupt.

But that seaside resource — which draws tourists from around the country to sunbathe, birdwatch and fish — is the main basis for the economy of Texas’s south coast, local elected officials argue.

“We’re selling nature,” Port Isabel City Manager Jared Hockema told the Chronicle last year. “That’s what we’re in the business of selling.”
The more industrialized parts of Texas’s Gulf Coast, such as the region surrounding Houston, has little nature to sell, Hockema argued. Up there, he said, “you see a bunch of smokestacks, you see ugly industrial development, and so we don’t want that type of development on the way to our city.”

The Biden administration has attempted to use its support for new coastal gas export terminals to thread the needle between the need to slow rapidly rising temperatures and right-flank pressure from America’s fossil fuel industry. 

One major element of this push is the idea that gas can be “certified” as lower-carbon, potentially creating a fuel with carbon emissions guaranteed to be about half that of coal, and easing sales to climate-conscious utilities in Europe and Asia, as The Hill reported.

Those benefits over coal largely vanish, however, if leaks along the gas supply chain aren’t controlled, according to a study in Science. That’s because gas is almost entirely composed of methane, a climate-warming gas dozens of times more potent that carbon dioxide.

A study released on Monday found that a lack of transparency in the certification industry can make it very difficult for communities or nonprofits to determine whether leaks are being successfully identified.

The International Energy Agency, the leading global watchdog, has consistently advised that no new oil and gas infrastructure can be developed if global temperatures are to increase less than 1.5 degrees Celsius — a number the world’s climate scientists have identified as a threshold to major disruptions to the world’s ecosystems, weather and breadbaskets.

In that light, “the approval of any new fossil fuel project is a failure of the Biden administration’s stated commitment to take action on both climate change and environmental justice,” Valentina Stackl of Oil Change International said in a statement.  

“It’s bad for the communities in Brownsville and the Rio Grande Valley who will suffer the worst consequences of this massive industrial plant on their health and well-being, it’s bad for our country as laggards to climate commitments, and it’s bad for our planet, as the clock is ticking to stave off the worst climate disasters.”