Energy Infrastructure Now More Impervious to Activists

So this is yet another story about the uneasy relationship between the fossil fuel industry and the communities in which it operates. And the community in this case is southwestern Louisiana. This part of the country has been home to a ton of energy infrastructure for a while now, but it could be seeing a lot more facilities pop up in the very near future. And those facilities are LNG terminals.

Llen G, of course, stands for liquefied natural gas. These are places where natural gas gets cooled too super low temperatures just how low we'll get to you in a second, and that allows it to be exported across the globe. The Biden administration is not the biggest fan of the fossil fuel industry. But it's granted approval to potentially double or even triple the number of these new LANG terminals along the Gulf coast. And it's easy to see why.

Regardless of what you think about the impact fossil fuels have on the environment, exporting natural gas means helping to reduce other countries reliance on Russian gas. But what does this mean for the Gulf coast communities that rely on the fossil fuel industry for jobs. Bloomberg Law reporter Daniel Moore traveled down to southwest Louisiana to talk to the industry and to the folks in these communities, and what

he found was, well, a whole lot of ambivalence. We'll get to that in a second, but first I asked Daniel to get me up to speed on exactly how LNG is made. Yeah. So, natural gas when it's drilled, when it moves through our country's pipeline system, is in gaseous form, of course, as the name implies. But when it reaches the terminal, it is piped in into this LNG terminal and it is basically refrigerated to negative two

hundred and sixty degrees fahrenheit. Which is about as cold as the dark side of the moon, so it is very very cold. So that temperature renders the gas a liquid. It's compressed by about six hundred times, so it's really really compressed, turns it into a liquid. It is stored for period of time, then it is put on a vessel shipped around the world in liquid form, and then it is shipped to another country where it is regasified,

put in that country's pipeline system. And that's the whole point of liquifying the natural gases that it makes it possible to send elsewhere, you know, not just across the country, but also to any place in the world, right correct, Yeah, And that could be a good thing environmentally because, as we've talked about on this podcast before, natural gas has a much lower carbon footprint than coal, which is what is used to fuel a lot of power plants. In fact,

here is Brian. He's with Sempra, a company that makes ellengy terminals. The United States has reduced greenhouse gas emissions more than any other country on the planet, and it's done that through two primary things. One is switching from coal to gas and power generation and other applications. Industrial applications as well, and then adding renewables. The majority of those carbon production has actually come from this coal to

gas switching kind of piece. We really do view ellen g as the way to export what what I know some have called it, I certainly have called the world's most successfully demonstrated greenhouse gas mitigation policy tool. So we just heard him talk about how great it is for the environment because it produces fewer greenhouse gas emissions, which I gather is true. But better does not necessarily mean good, right,

can you get into to that. I mean, we're still it's still producing greenhouse gases, right, Everything is on a sliding scale, right, So natural gas Brian is repeating the the core argument that the gas industry has made for several years now, which is that it's largely displacing dirtier burning fuels like coal and oil in the United States

and around the world. But throughout this system, you still have to drill for gas, you have to transport via pipeline, you have to build more compressor stations to move the gas, and all along the way there could be leaks of methane, which is the primary component of natural gas, and methane is a much much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon

dioxide is. And so while you have while it may be true that at at power plant facility burning natural gas will cause fewer air emission impacts than burning coal, you do have to take into account the entire system, and then we're just talking about climate. You know, there are other environmental impacts besides greenhouse gases. You know, there's air pollution which really affects the people who live near these facilities, and which will will meet a few of

those in just a bit. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean there are a few different concern around Ellengy itself, which is that one, it consumes so much energy that they actually have to build often a power plant on site that burns natural gas. Of course, so you have kind of natural gas burning going on to produce the electricity

to refrigerate the natural gas. You also have concerns about flaring, which would be venting off, you know, gases to prevent explosions or to prevent anything else operationally from happening at the plant that would that would cause harm to the plant. So that they often vent these refrigerant gases off, They vent carbon dioxide, they vent methane, and that's a big concern if you're living nearby. I mean that causes you know, air quality impacts and obviously there's a big torch visually

right next to your property if that happened. So there there are local concerns around Ellengy as well. Well. That said, you had a pretty eye catching map in your story that you you just published on this that showed the locations all of the Llengy terminals that are currently built on the Gulf Coast and then all of the Llengy terminals that are approved or awaiting approval from the federal government.

And it's like four or five times more. Like the amount of these facilities that are going to be built is so much higher than are currently there. What's going on here? I mean, it seems like this has got to be a concerted effort from the Biden administration to build more of these terminals. Right. This actually goes back to fracking, which is the drilling technique that unlocked all this natural gas. And this goes back to probably about the mid two thousands when fracking started to unlock a

lot of this natural gas. This was cheap, abundant supplies of fuel. It caused a lot of US utilities to switch from coal to gas and thereby lower emissions from the power sector and fracking and natural gas has kind of had this bipartisan support from lawmakers from multiple presidential administrations get play out during the Obama administration originally, and so the industry, largely from these market forces, started looking abroad. It started looking to export this gas because we had

so much of it. In fact, a lot of these export terminals were built as import terminals to begin with, and they just flipped it to exporting. I think one of the people that you spoke to who works in the energy industry said about that, we got it so wrong that we got it right. Yeah, that was Brian, And Brian's point was market forces created this ocean of natural gas. It was cheap for policymakers. It was hard to argue against something that was cutting power sector emissions

and was affordable. And a lot of these terminals were approved under their prior administration. I think they're about fourteen right now that have been approved and are just waiting to be built, and there are another seven proposed to

federal regulators under the Abiden administration. But to your point, the Biden administration is walking a tight rope between further entrenching gas and fossil fuels, which you know a lot of their supporters don't don't want, versus energy security and the fact that our energy system right now depends a lot of natural gas, to say nothing of Europe and

the situation there. But you went down to Louisiana and you visited a few of these terminals, and you talk to people who live near them, and let's hear from one of those. Uh, this is John Ahlaire. He lives next to one of these torches that you just described. You can't operate like that's burning money, do you know? You see how much natural gas it takes to burn

their flair. That's all natural gas plus liquids and pollutants that are heavier hydrocarbons is what I'm saying, that are being burn That's they burned enough in the last three weeks to fuel the whole city like Charles for a year. I get the sense that living next to an Ellengy terminal is not great. Can you tell me more about what it was like and what the people who you spoke to, what their lads are like. Yeah, it's definitely

generates some different perspectives. So for John, he was right across the river from an Llengy terminal that just started operating a few weeks ago by the time I talked to him, and it was flaring all the time, and that isn't something that usually happens, as I understand it, at Llengy terminals, but because this had just started, perhaps

they were having some operational difficulties. In fact, the state suggested that there were some operational issues as they were starting up and had to flare a lot of gas. And so at night, this flare was lighting up the coastline. I mean, there's not a lot of population around that terminal and there's not a lot of light pollution or anything like that. So it was a very stark thing to have this this torch lighting up the night sky.

And for people like John who moved to that area for you know, the wetlands and kind of the wildlife and bird watching, having something like that can be a problem. And also, uh, your John is very concerned about that

paving over habitat in that area as well. And so there's another lleng terminal proposed directly next to him on his side of the river, and he's very concerned about you know, his property getting flooded during hurricanes and you know, slowly watching the ocean come under his property and destroy this habitat. And that's that's one of his concerns. Yeah. Well,

and you know what, it just occurred to me. You know, I earlier said, you know that living next to an LLENG terminal is not great, and from John's respective, it certainly isn't. But actually, you know, another thing that I'm realizing from your story is that for a lot of people, it is because LLENG terminals provide a lot of jobs. And this is a part of the country. You know, we're talking about the Gulf Coast that has been devastated

by natural disasters after natural disasters. So you know, maybe I spoke too soon. Maybe this is an economic lifeline. Can you talk about that sort of push and pull where people are concerned about the environmental impacts, but also are you glad that they have this economic engine in

their community. Yeah, that's the other perspective, And that's one of the reasons I wanted to go to this part of the country specifically, because you have these hurricanes that have rolled in over and over again, and a community like Cameron or like Charles is still rebuilding two years later, following following the most recent round of hurricanes, and a lot of people in Cameron that had their restaurants or

homes destroyed, or motels or hotels. C LNG see this plant that has just started up there as a lifeline for the community. One of the people I spoke with was running a food truck and he had his restaurant destroyed two years ago, and he was fielding a very busy lunchtime crowd of LNG workers and actually going into the plant and delivering these catered lunches, and his words were, the only thing keeping us alive is the LNG. So

people have very different perspectives. And if you view it as an economic development measure to provide dollars to the community to provide jobs, it's a very powerful argument. Yeah. I think that one of the people that you spoke to that summarize this really well is Jeames Hyatt. He's an environmental activist but also used to work in the oil and gas industry, and he really talked about the ambivalence there that you know that this is maybe not good for the community in one sense, but in the

other sense it's inevitable this is going to happen. So let's hear from him, and I should say you spoke to him in a coffee shop where because it's Louisiana, of course they're going to be playing some jazz music. And that's the same. I think for most people here, it's not that they love all in a gas. They love the paycheck, the time off, the ability has been

with their family and and we still drive caught. So until we get to the other side of this where we don't need that fuel that I guess that's the thing is so so the industry that's here is going to probably be here for a while until we you know, while we're transitioning and shifting, well, we don't need is to build out seven more facilities to export this gas.

So to put a sort of to put a big bow on this, I guess it seems like a very ambivalent, complicated situation, but it seems like it's moving in one direction. You know, you have the US exporting wanting you to export more natural gas, and especially given what happened in the Ukraine earlier this year, you know, we had sanctions on Russia and sanctions on Russian energy. The demand for US exports of natural gas is only going in one direction.

Do you feel like there's any way that the community here, the environmental activists that want to stop this from happening, can given that all the economic signals are pushing in the opposite direction. Yeah, it's definitely an uphill battle. And James talked about that quite a bit. He's a former oil refinery worker actually in Lake Charles and has a

lot of friends who still work in the industry. A lot of those workers see ellen G as a cleaner job compared to again going back to cut of the sliding scale of energy compared to an oil refinery, and

in a lot of ways it can be. And so to start pushing that boulder up a hill, to start pushing back against an industry that is so entrenched in this region of the country, certainly around the Houston area in southwest Louisiana, it's a it's a tough it's a tough challenge, and there's not a whole lot happening in the way of clean energy jobs, and unions have a tough time kind of making headway in that region compared to other parts of the country, and so making that

environmental justice argument is very difficult, but also, you know, it kind of beat that definition of environmental justice in another sense because you have these communities that have been dealing with this industry for such a long time. And that's why I think it's a really interesting policy question for regulators. Well, let's give the last word to Rocheta Ozane.

She's another environmental activist who you spoke to, and she summarized it exactly where she said, you know, we want clean energy, we want renewable energy jobs, but they have to be good jobs. They have to be reunion jobs.

Let's hear from her, and we need to show people proof that water energy and solar energy and wind energy that we need to show people proof that it works and that the same people they go and get the tchining to work in the industries are the same folk they could work in these jobs, but they have to be good paying jobs and they have to re unionized job so that people would even be interested in switching. But we don't even have that to offer folks right now.

So we are not at the point oh shutting down anything or stopping anything from coming, because all people see is that you're trying to stop jobs from coming here. Yeah, because we don't have anything to offer to replace it, all right. That was Rochetta Ozane, an environmental activist in Louisiana. And also that was Daniel Moore, a Bloomberg Cloud reporter here talking about his trip to the Gulf Coast. Thank you Daniel talking with us, Thanks for having me, And

that'll do it for today's episode of Parts Pervilion. If you want more environmental news, check us out on Twitter. We used the handle at environment I'm at David B. Schultz. That's b as in leze le bonton rule. Today's episode of Parts for a Billion was produced by myself, David Schultz. Parts per Billion was created by Jessica Coombs and Rachel Dagle and it's edited by Zach Sherwood and Chuck McCutcheon.

Our executive producer is Josh Thanks everyone for listening. The killers of Bertacasis had every reason to believe they'd get away with murder. Her work as an environmental activist won her the admiration of celebrities in California, politicians in Washington, and the indigenous communities she worked alongside in Honduras. It also earned her powerful enemies on a new podcast from Bloomberg Green. Blood River follows a four year quest to

find Bertacassus's killers. Join journalist Montyreel and the team from Bloomberg Green as they untangle false leads and mishandled evidence, taking listeners deep into a sector of international development that's marked by high level corruption and rampant violence. Blood River debuts Monday, July twenty seven on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.