The Biden/Harris LNG Export Policies Are Losing Credibility

The foundational basis for the Biden/Harris permitting pause related to LNG export facilities has fallen apart in recent weeks, and now the administration’s apparent anti-natural gas bias seems to be impacting funding decisions by the U.S. Export/Import Bank (EXIM) as well.

A Flimsy Foundation For The LNG Pause

The White House’s LNG pause decision was based on an inaccurate preview of an analysis by Robert Howarth, a Cornell University faculty member who has been a long-time critic of American natural gas and LNG. In a preview of his study release in January, Howarth originally claimed LNG’s life-cycle emissions range between 24% and 247% greater than coal. But the final release of that study, published in September, landed on a claim of 33%, a fraction of the original range claimed in a preview used by the administration in January. Meanwhile, data consistently demonstrates that natural gas and LNG are key to reducing both domestic and global emissions, a fact that has played a major role in enabling the US to meet carbon reduction targets over the last two decades, as a vast swath of coal-fired power plants have been displaced by natural gas.

More recently, claims have emerged that the administration may have withheld the fact that it had already conducted the very environmental review it claimed in January needed to be pursued by the Department of Energy as justification for invoking the permitting pause. Members of the House Oversight Committee sent a letter to Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm last week demanding communications and documentation related to a draft study her department allegedly conducted in 2023.