Despite a spotty track record, Venture Global to become picture of new federal “energy dominance” The Lens Delaney Dryfoos March 11, 2025 On Thursday, enormous American flags adorned the towering construction project in Port Sulphur, which sits about 20 miles south of New Orleans near the end of Plaquemines Parish, which sits on a narrow peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico – or Gulf of America, if you prefer – and is solid Trump country, with 68% of its voters casting ballots for President Donald Trump. The flags signaled support for the president’s newly announced policy to establish American “energy dominance” worldwide. Gov. Jeff Landry, who ran for office pledging to “unleash Louisiana’s oil and gas production,” arrived at Venture Global’s vast and expanding liquified natural gas (LNG) export facility in Port Sulphur alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The two federal officials lead the National Energy Dominance Council, formed through a Trump executive order last month, to spur U.S. oil and gas production and reverse the checks on fossil fuels that President Joe Biden had overseen during his time in office. “The prior administration had a full-on attack against U.S. energy,” Burgum told a crowd of workers at the Plaquemines LNG facility, whom he lauded, saying there’s “nothing more patriotic than American workers that are working to build energy dominance.” Wright echoed that point. “You are bringing America back,” he said, noting that Louisiana exports more LNG than any other state. “This is number one.”The visit was a “stunt,” with officials focused more on investors than the workers they praised, said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization.
“Secretaries Wright and Burgum’s stunt just shows that their allegiance will always be with the oil and gas industry instead of the people,” Slocum said The officials had traveled to Port Sulphur to help Venture Global CEO Mike Sabel announce an $18 billion third-phase expansion, which would supersize the terminal into the largest LNG export facility in the country. The Plaquemines LNG export facility was approved by President Trump in 2019 and began shipping cargo in late December. The second phase of construction is expected to be completed by September 2025. Built along the Mississippi River on a 632-acre site, big enough to swallow nearly 500 football fields, the Plaquemines LNG site is so large that its employees must take buses across it. The three-phase project, which Burgum called “the biggest construction project in North America,” has, within its first two phases, already depleted local water supplies. Whenever its workforce leaves a shift, traffic becomes so dense that one minister stopped conducting funerals on weekdays. During hurricane season, the additional traffic on the peninsula’s one highway clogs evacuation routes and hinders emergency response.
Here, in Port Sulphur, a campus of equipment freezes natural gas down to -260 degrees Fahrenheit, creating a liquified form that vessels can carry to overseas markets in special cooling tanks. To freeze the gas to those temperatures, the engines produce a large amount of carbon-dioxide exhaust that the company plans to inject underground, through a still-questionable technology called Carbon Capture and Sequestration. The third phase of the Plaquemines facility is not yet an actuality. A final investment decision on the next phase will come after the company produces LNG at a different Venture Global export facility in southwest Louisiana, near Lake Charles. As proposed, the 1,150-acre CP2 facility will sit adjacent to the company’s existing, 432-acre Calcasieu Pass (CP1) facility. Last year, the Biden administration delayed issuing an export authorization to CP2 and others, to determine the growing industry’s climate effects. But last week, Burgum assured the rapt crowd that the U.S. Department of the Interior would lead America to energy dominance by giving unfettered access to the country’s natural resources, cutting red tape and “getting the federal government off the back of the worker, off the back of companies.” Since January, the president has made several key changes, to reverse Biden-era regulations and litigation in ways that directly affect Louisiana communities. On the first day of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. Department of Energy reversed the LNG pause on approvals for pending export applications, adopted by the Biden Administration as a check on rapid LNG expansion that would have allowed the department to update climate and economic analyses used to determine whether such authorizations are in the public interest. Without that pause, Louisiana’s CP2 plant will likely move more swiftly into the construction phase, after state officials give their expected nod to its air-permit applications.
In February, the Trump administration greenlit the first export approval for another, smaller, LNG plant proposed for Cameron Parish. Commonwealth LNG plans to build an additional export terminal on 150 acres along the right side of the Calcasieu Ship Channel, just across from Venture Global’s operating CP1 facility. And on Mardi Gras, days before last week’s visit to Port Sulphur, the Trump administration announced plans to drop a federal lawsuit against Denka, a Japanese company that runs the Denka Performance Elastomer plant, where the Environmental Protection Agency had measured high levels of chloroprene, a toxic chemical and likely carcinogen. Those toxins were released into the predominantly Black community of LaPlace, La., the lawsuit alleged.The new administration also canceled a 1994 environmental justice directive requiring federal agencies to analyze environmental and public health hazards in minority or low-income communities and to avoid adding to them......to be expected- screw the public, screw the environment https://thelensnola.org/2025/