Court Rulings & Regs Cause Delays in New LNG Export Plants
RBN Energy recently concluded a two-part series on LNG delays and what’s causing delays in bringing more export capacity online. Friday’s Part 2 of the series looks at recent court rulings and regulatory issues and their impact on U.S. LNG development. Yes, Joe Biden’s ill-timed “pause” on the Department of Energy issuing new export approvals certainly had a big impact (see White House Makes it Official – Biden Declares War on LNG Exports). But, there were other regulatory and court-related issues in 2024 that also had an impact on the slowdown in new LNG exports. Read More “Court Rulings & Regs Cause Delays in New LNG Export Plants”
At the end of December, Venture Global’s Plaquemines LNG export facility officially shipped its first cargo…to Germany. Unfortunately for Venture Global’s contracted customers, they will have to wait to receive their legally contracted shipments. Venture Global has admitted it will (as it has with the its Calcasieu Pass facility) pretend the Plaquemines LNG is not “commercially ready,” allowing the company to cream the market and make more money for the first couple of years (see 
U.S. natural gas demand from LNG plants (the feedgas that flows to the plants) hit a new all-time record high on Tuesday, Dec. 31st, the last day of the year. Feedgas flows climbed to 15.2 billion cubic feed (Bcf) in a sign of a strong year ahead from the startup of two new gas-processing plants. Venture Global LNG’s Plaquemines plant in Louisiana and Cheniere Energy’s Corpus Christi Stage 3 expansion in Texas recently came online (at least partially), driving feedgas flows higher. 
Just as the pandemic began to unfold in early 2020, Shell pulled out of a 50/50 joint venture partnership with Energy Transfer (ET) to build a new LNG export facility in Lake Charles, Louisiana (see 
Yesterday, MDN brought you the news that the Biden Department of Energy (DOE) and its grossly incompetent leader, Jennifer Granholm, released a fake “study” that recommends not approving any more LNG export facilities, claiming we already have enough in the pipeline to last us forevermore (see 
According to Dan Eberhart, CEO of Canary, LLC (the sixth-largest wellhead services company in the U.S.), the world is bracing for another energy crisis this winter, with natural gas markets “teetering” on the brink of volatility. It would not take much to push the world into another run on natural gas supplies, which would push prices to “multi-year highs.” The “looming crisis” underscores the urgent need for robust and consistent American energy policies—something the Biden administration’s recent pause on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export approvals has failed to deliver. The antidote, the fix for this fragile market, is the incoming Trump-Vance administration. 
Yesterday, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), headed by the ultra-dumb Jennifer Granholm, issued a bogus “study” (copy below) arguing that no new approvals should be granted for additional LNG exports. The report (and Granholm, in a cover letter) argues that “the amounts [of LNG export facilities] that have already been approved will be more than sufficient to meet global demand for U.S. LNG for decades to come.” In other words, the so-called elites know better than the free market how many LNG export plants the country should support. Granholm argues in favor of a command-and-control approach (i.e., Communism) over a free market, free enterprise approach to approving new LNG exports. 
This is VERY interesting. The nonpartisan S&P Global, which never (we mean NEVER) seeks to ruffle political feathers, released a study on LNG exports on the very same day as the Biden/Granholm Department of Energy released its LNG export study. The S&P study, which came out a few hours earlier than the DOE study, says more U.S. LNG exports will NOT raise the domestic price of natural gas, at least not appreciably. The Biden-corrupted DOE report says the opposite, that more LNG exports will cause domestic natural gas prices to go through the roof (and consequently, we shouldn’t build more LNG export facilities). Who do you believe? The company that is one of THE largest financial analysis companies in the world, that manages the S&P 500 Index and S&P credit ratings? Or lying, sore-loser politicians like the ditsy Jennifer Granholm and Joementia Biden? 
In January, Joementia announced a “pause” on any approvals for new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year while his people pretend to figure out how to measure global warming as a new consideration for whether or not to approve a project (see 
What is the Biden Department of Energy (DOE) hiding? Four times now, Republican lawmakers from Congress have asked the DOE to reveal the scientific process it is using to “evaluate” how the federal government approves LNG export requests. The Bidenistas are stonewalling and refusing to comply with the request, implying they are using less-than-rigorous standards to produce a fake report. The Bidenistas are using political science instead of real science to evaluate LNG exports. You can expect a politically motivated report when the ditsy Jennifer Granholm (DOE Secretary) finally issues the LNG report we’ve been waiting for for the past year. 
In June, we told you that a once-respected oil and gas consultancy had become a partisan purveyor of pap (see