Earlier this year, the Biden administration approved Project Willow, a massive oil drilling complex to be built in Alaska on thawing permafrost that may require mechanical refreezing before drilling. Not surprisingly, Willow was met with opposition—more than 5 million people, many of them young people, signed a petition opposing the plan, and 1 million sent a letter to the White House— era noted last month that this could become “a wild card factor in next year’s presidential campaign.”
But Liu Field is not the only major fossil fuel project underway. Soon, you may also be hearing a lot about CP2, or Calcasieu Pass 2, a massive proposed LNG export terminal off the Louisiana coast that the Biden administration may approve or reject this fall. The project, the largest of at least two dozen LNG terminals proposed by a handful of companies to transport natural gas primarily from the Permian Basin in the Southwest to overseas customers, is typical of late-stage petrocapitalism: it would have Fuels that help lock in Earth’s dependence on fossil energy have long passed the tipping point for the climate system identified by scientists. It will highlight one of the most critical and least-discussed parts of the climate fight: America’s rapidly increasing exports of oil and natural gas to the rest of the world. How big the fight over CP2 could be: The greenhouse gas emissions associated with it would be twenty times greater than those from Willow oil drilling, according to veteran energy analyst Jeremy Symons.
The Calcasieu Passage is a 68-mile waterway that dates back to the 1870s and was then dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers to provide deep-water access to Lake City from the Gulf of Mexico 30 miles north. Charles – It is now the twelfth largest port in the United States. The waterway’s location is strategic not only because ships can easily reach it from the Gulf of Mexico, but also because pipelines can easily reach it from the Permian Basin. Venture Global, a Virginia-based company focused on becoming the country’s leading natural gas exporter, has built Calcasieu Pass 1 (known as CP1), a massive LNG terminal on the channel in Cameron Parish. and another receiving station is being built in Plaquemines Parish, twenty miles south of New Orleans, at the confluence of the Gulf of Mexico and the Mississippi River. Now, Venture Global has applied for a license to build CP2, a larger facility adjacent to CP1 with the capacity to export 20 million tonnes of LNG per year. Seven terminals are already in use along the Louisiana coast and in neighboring areas of Texas, such as Port Arthur.
It’s the largest LNG boom in history, a feat made all the more remarkable considering U.S. oil and gas exports were essentially zero before 2016, when congressional Democrats agreed to end four-year climate talks in Paris just days after they concluded. Ten years of natural gas exports. A ban on the sale of U.S. oil overseas this year is in exchange for expanded tax credits for the solar and wind industries in an omnibus spending bill. The first large-scale LNG exports began in 2016; Vladimir Putin made the case for more exports in 2022 when he launched an attack on Ukraine and shut off gas supplies to Europe. The United States and other countries rose to the challenge, exporting 56 billion cubic meters to the EU last year; the Biden administration has pledged another $50 billion this winter. Still, projects like CP2 will take at least three years to complete, by which time the geopolitical reasoning may have faded, but the infrastructure will last for decades. The United States has now surpassed Russia and Qatar to become the world’s largest exporter of LNG.
And this is just the beginning. A new report released last week (I helped present the data at the press conference) shows that more than one-third of oil and gas production growth between now and 2035 is expected to come from the United States – The author is based in Oil Change International, a research and advocacy group in Washington, D.C., said this would make the United States “the planet’s destroyer-in-chief.” If that sounds strange, you need to consider the world’s artificial distinction between domestic and foreign emissions, given the level of climate action underway since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act in the summer of 2022. This is a mathematical problem, although not very difficult.
President Biden has said he will cut U.S. emissions in half from 2005 levels by 2030; the IRA’s massive investments in electric vehicles, wind turbines and more should accomplish a large part of that mission. But at the same time, the government oversees continued growth in fossil fuel exports. (Venture Global alone plans to produce 100 million metric tons of LNG per year.) Emissions from all this natural gas are not officially “counted” in the U.S. emissions totals because the gas will be burned elsewhere and, according to NOC Burn according to the rules. The United Nations, the burning nation, not the producing nation, is facing this problem. But the atmosphere doesn’t care where fossil fuels are burned; it only cares where fossil fuels are burned. The resulting carbon dioxide quickly mixes into the atmosphere, causing temperatures to rise everywhere. And if those emissions are added “to our footprint,” analyst Jeremy Symons recently told me, “our total emissions in 2030 will be about the same as they were in 2005.” These rules, he said, constitute “the history of the world.” The greatest scam ever”. We are so focused on domestic emissions that we completely ignore what happens when we export. “
Venture Global declined to comment for this article, but said it was, in fact, cleaning up the world’s energy system because “as the cost of LNG falls, more global growth economies will realize the environmental benefits of clean-burning natural gas.” That said, if developing economies don’t get LNG, they may turn to burning coal. So far, the Biden administration has subscribed to that reasoning. Natural gas from the proposed CP2 terminal must obtain an export license from the Department of Energy before it can be sold to markets outside the small group of countries with which the United States has free trade agreements. But to weigh that decision, the department is still using a Trump-era analysis that simply compared burning natural gas to, say, burning coal and concluded that natural gas has a smaller climate impact. That may or may not be true — Energy Department officials have sidestepped a realistic analysis of how much heat-trapping methane leaks during fracking. But either way, that’s not the point, because the world is no longer theoretically targeting incremental transitions, such as from coal to natural gas.
As the climate crisis deepens, it is clear to first scientists and then diplomats that the necessary goal is “net zero”, which is why the International Energy Agency announced in 2021 that all new changes to fossil fuel infrastructure will be banned from that year. Investment should stop. “The path to net zero emissions is narrow but achievable,” explains the IEA’s Fatih Birol. “If we want to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, we don’t need more investment in new oil, gas and coal projects.” Obviously, this means we shouldn’t build any new LNG export terminals, we don’t Instead of exporting gas, it should be exported and help pay for the solar farms and wind turbines that can help us get closer to net zero emissions.as scientific american The Gulf Coast state of Texas was reportedly able to keep its grid running during this summer’s heat wave precisely because the state built so much solar and battery capacity.
