ENB Pub Note: I highly recomend subscribing to David Blackmon’s Substack HERE: https://blackmon.substack.com/p/white-house-implements-nakedly-political?r=2ey9k&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
David’s industry opinions and knowledge are right on target. Prepare for more sweeping negative impacting energy policies from the Biden administration.
If you’ve been wondering how much lower the Biden White House would go to appease their radical climate alarmist funder base leading up to November’s election, the President and his handlers provided a preview of coming attractions on Thursday.
The New York Times and others reported Wednesday that the White House was planning to announce it would pause permitting approvals for Venture Global LNG’s Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) project planned in Louisiana. Biden’s handlers said they are directing the Department of Energy to expand a review of LNG export projects to include more climate change criteria, despite the fact that the required environmental impact studies have already been conducted related to the project.
Thursday evening, the White House issued a statement formalizing that plan:
The full announcement found at this link naturally attributes the need for this move to the mythical “climate emergency.” Because of course it does.
Here’s a key excerpt:
Today, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing a temporary pause on pending decisions on exports of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) to non-FTA countries until the Department of Energy can update the underlying analyses for authorizations. The current economic and environmental analyses DOE uses to underpin its LNG export authorizations are roughly five years old and no longer adequately account for considerations like potential energy cost increases for American consumers and manufacturers beyond current authorizations or the latest assessment of the impact of greenhouse gas emissions. Today, we have an evolving understanding of the market need for LNG, the long-term supply of LNG, and the perilous impacts of methane on our planet. We also must adequately guard against risks to the health of our communities, especially frontline communities in the United States who disproportionately shoulder the burden of pollution from new export facilities. The pause, which is subject to exception for unanticipated and immediate national security emergencies, will provide the time to integrate these critical considerations.
Most of that is utter BS, but exactly what we all should have come to expect from this increasingly desperate and dishonest White House.
The truth, of course, is that this a nakedly transparent partisan political move designed to appease the Democrat party’s huge funders in the climate alarm and coordinating lawfare movements in advance of the 2024 elections. The need to mention and demonize MAGA in the shorter press release for a formal administration policy decision likely violates the Hatch Act and proves the partisan nature of the move.
In a story published Thursday at EnergyNow.ca, a Venture Global had this to say: “Such an action would shock the global energy market, having the impact of an economic sanction, and send a devastating signal to our allies that they can no longer rely on the United States,” said Shaylyn Hynes, a company spokeswoman.
This is very likely true, especially in Europe, which continues to have a pressing need for increasing volumes of US LNG to feed a struggling economy, especially in Germany. Biden’s action does indeed amount to an economic sanction on customer nations for US LNG, but again, that is an action that should surprise no one coming from this president’s handlers, who have chosen to use US currency and economic might as weapons of war in myriad instances since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
The positive news is that the US LNG industry has a variety of new LNG projects already under construction that will add as much as 12 bcf/day of export capacity by the end of 2027. Those projects are unlikely to be hampered by this specific action, though there can be no guarantees the administration will not make a move on those as well. Witness Biden’s act on January 21, 2021 to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, an action take despite the fact that the pipeline’s developer, TC Energy, had already invested $8 billion in that project and that Biden could not cite a single example of the project standing in violation of US law or regulation.
But even if those projects already underway remain unmolested by this latest authoritarian action by the Biden White House, the big concern is that this pause in approval action today will create a pause in additional needed new expansion post-2027. No one can know for sure what the world’s geopolitical situation will look like that far in advance, but such a pause at that time could result in untold hardships on nations that are supposedly American allies.
Bottom line, this decision by Biden and his handlers, motivated entirely by hyper-partisan politics as it is, provides just one more example that helps to explain why the world has become increasingly unstable and dangerous since the day Biden took office.