09/11/2024 | Press release | Archived content
An LNG tanker ship docked at Venture Global's Calcasieu Pass export facility in Cameron Parish, Louisiana
Julie Dermansky for NRDC
In June 2024, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) approved Venture Global LNG, LLC's application to construct and operate the Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal for the east side of the Calcasieu Ship Channel in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. It also approved the CP Express Pipeline, an 85.4-mile pipeline that would feed up to 4.4 million dekatherms of gas per day from eastern Texas to the CP2 facility for the sole purpose of exporting the LNG overseas.
Cameron Parish was once an idyllic rural coastal community with a long fishing history. Fishing, shrimping, and tourism are key cultural activities and heritage industries for local communities, which include Tribes and environmental justice communities. But in recent years, the region has been targeted as a new industrial hub to support the rapid expansion of LNG exports. FERC has already approved half a dozen massive LNG export facilities in the area, transforming southwestern Louisiana-and Cameron Parish, in particular-from the "sportsman's paradise" that the state references on its license plates into a fossil fuel sacrifice zone.
The CP2 LNG project is Venture Global's fourth permitted major LNG facility. It is estimated that this project alone will emit greenhouse gas amounts that are equivalent to putting more than 1.85 million additional gas-fueled automobiles on the road. FERC also predicts that the ambient air quality around the project will exceed the national air quality standards for multiple air pollutants. Not to mention the fact that, as FERC Commissioner Allison Clements said in her dissent to the project, the project "threatens to irrevocably end shrimping business ventures in the area."
So in September 2024, NRDC and our partners challenged FERC's approval of the CP2 LNG terminal and the CP Express Pipeline in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. We will argue that FERC violated the law by not taking the adverse environmental and socioeconomic impacts seriously when it approved this project.
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