On many nights, John Allaire can turn off the lights in his house and keep reading a book by the glow of 80-foot-high flares blasting from a gas export terminal a mile away.
The prospect of a second liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal in his once-peaceful corner of southwest Louisiana is unsettling for Allaire, a retired oil and gas engineer whose house sits near Calcasieu Pass.
“There’s the ongoing noise pollution, ongoing flaring,” he said. “And the light pollution is unbelievable.”
Venture Global, the U.S.’s second-largest LNG producer, plans to build a second terminal alongside its Calcasieu Pass facility in sparsely populated Cameron Parish. Venture also owns the newly built Plaquemines LNG terminal, about 20 miles south of New Orleans.
The proposed second Venture terminal in Cameron, dubbed CP2, was recently granted an export permit by the U.S. Department of Energy. The permit was the fifth LNG-related approval from the department since President Donald Trump took office and lifted former President Joe Biden’s pause on new LNG permits.
The Trump administration aims to cut “red tape around projects like CP2” and boost the availability of “affordable, reliable, secure American energy,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said in a statement.
Louisiana has four LNG terminals and two more are under construction. Many more are welcome, said Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry.
“Every time these projects come to Louisiana, [they] give the people of our state the ability to have their income raised,” he said during a speech last month announcing Australian company Woodside Energy’s decision to invest nearly $18 billion in a stalled terminal project, formerly known as Driftwood LNG, near Lake Charles, about 22 miles north of CP2.
Environmental groups say reviving the LNG building boom has serious consequences for coastal communities, fisheries and the climate.
“It has been damaging to our coast, damaging to our air quality and our water quality,” said Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade. “It’s destroyed property values [and] it’s certainly damaging to our health.”
Venture did not respond to a request for comment.
LNG is natural gas cooled to a liquid state, compressing its volume and making it easier to store and ship long distances. Six of the country’s eight LNG export terminals dot the western Gulf Coast, including the world’s largest, Sabine Pass LNG in west Cameron. LNG shipments from the U.S. have skyrocketed over the past decade, rising from about 16 billion cubic feet in 2014 to just under 4.4 trillion cubic feet last year, making the U.S. the world leader in LNG exports. A little more than half of U.S. LNG goes to Europe, where demand has slowed in recent years, but Asia is hungry for more, with that continent’s share of exports rising to more than 30% last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Venture’s Calcasieu Pass terminal had a rocky startup process that began in 2022 and ended last month when the facility sent its first shipments. The company’s construction strategy, which relied on pre-fabricated, modular components to speed construction and cut costs, resulted in power outages, several repairs and dozens of pollution violations, according to company documents and a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. In 2022, the facility exceeded its air pollution permits 139 times, according to the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality. A March warning letter from DEQ indicated many problems haven’t been fixed. The letter cited recent inspections showing several “areas of concern,” including frequent emissions violations and failures to report air pollution exceedances.
Much of the pollution comes from flaring, a process often triggered by operational malfunctions that force facilities to burn excess gas to avoid fires or explosions. Flaring emits chemicals that can cause cancer, respiratory illnesses and other health problems.
The Calcasieu Pass facility is allowed 60 flaring hours annually by DEQ, but nearby residents allege it goes well over that allowance.
“It’s been ongoing, sometimes days in a row,” Allaire said.
Commercial shrimpers in Cameron and Calcasieu parishes say dredging to deepen waterways for large LNG transport ships has harmed habitat and made fishing harder.
“The numbers we’re catching now have decreased drastically,” shrimper Travis Dardar said.
Boosting the U.S.’s LNG export prowess is “part of one of the biggest fossil fuel build-outs in our lifetimes,” and will dampen efforts to shift toward cleaner energy sources like solar and wind, said Ethan Nuss, an organizer with the Rainforest Action Network.
“This will deepen the climate crisis and lock us into decades of emissions,” he said.
Rolfes said opposing LNG is now doubly hard because both the state and federal government strongly back the industry. Instead of focusing on regulators, environmental groups may attempt to delay projects through lawsuits or convince the industry’s insurers and investors that LNG is a bad long-term bet.
“We’ll keep getting the word out about their accident history [and] their horrible track records as business partners,” Rolfes said. “But we acknowledge the odds are tremendous.”