The Biden administration will reportedly pause a decision on approving what would be one of the world’s largest gas export hubs, amid concern from climate experts that greenlighting the project would create a “carbon mega bomb”.
The project, Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, would be positioned near the rapidly eroding Louisiana shoreline and be the biggest such export terminal in the US and part of a huge expansion of new gas infrastructure along the Gulf of Mexico.
The New York Times, citing three unnamed sources, reported Wednesday that the administration was pausing the decision in a delay that could stretch past the November election.
The move, the sources said, could spell trouble for the project and 16 other proposed terminals, as the energy department had been asked to expand its evaluation of CP2 to assess its impact on climate change, as well as on the economy and national security, the Times said.
The report comes as Biden, who passed landmark climate legislation in August 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act, and whose White House has been pushing funding boosts for electric vehicles in recent weeks, has disappointed many climate activists who have been alarmed by US oil and gas production breaking records.
Bill McKibben, the author and climate campaigner who has led opposition to CP2, reacted to the NYT report in a tweet saying: “If this story is correct, Joe Biden has just done more than any president before him to check the expansion of dirty energy (and helped American consumers at the same time).”
One expert previously calculated that the CP2 project could create emissions that were 20 times greater than the controversial Willow oil project in Alaska, which was approved by the Biden administration despite a huge outcry from Democrats, Indigenous tribes and climate campaigners last year.
“This is a carbon mega bomb,” said Jeremy Symons, a former Environmental Protection Agency official, of CP2, speaking to the Guardian last October. “The scale of the project is almost unfathomable and it locks us into a fossil fuel dependency for the next 30 years. If all we do is shift from coal to gas, we are cooked.”
CP2 would ship up to 24m tons of liquified natural gas (LNG) each year once built.
Venture Global, the company behind CP2, had hoped to start building by 2026, and is requesting a permit to operate until 2050, a point when Biden aims for the US to have zeroed out its emissions.
The firm has previously rejected criticism from climate experts. “The well-funded environmental activists opposing CP2 and all US LNG projects are completely out of touch with reality,” a spokesperson for Venture Global told the Guardian last year, adding that opposing utilities of its kind would “only result in continued and increased coal use and prevent the reduction of global emissions”.
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January 25, 2024 at 02:41AM
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Biden administration reportedly pauses approval of ‘carbon mega bomb’ gas export hub - The Guardian US
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