There’s a lot going on in the world of liquified natural gas, or LNG. And we are here to tell you about it! The Department of Energy just released its big report on whether exporting more LNG is in the public interest…spoiler alert: it’s not. One of the largest LNG facilities in the world, located just south of New Orleans, recently began production. And there are a slew of other export terminals waiting in the wings for approval. Almost all of them are located on the Gulf Coast.
There are two competing LNG narratives…fossil fuel companies and their big investors all sing its praise saying LNG is great for the climate and Americans. But, environmentalists, scientists, the Department of Energy, and even other private industries all say the opposite.
It’s a pivotal time for energy. And the battle over LNG will play a huge role in our future climate. That’s why we at Sea Change produced a one-hour version of our 3 part series "All Gassed Up." If you don’t have time to listen to three episodes, this 1-hour special will give you the backstory…how this booming industry came to be, how the Gulf Coast became its epicenter, and how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and even the nuclear meltdown of Fukushima all helped lead to this moment.
This 1-hour special was hosted, written, and reported by Halle Parker and Carlyle Calhoun. It was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. This special was edited by Johanna Zorn and Jack Rodolico. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. And our theme music is by Jon Batiste.
This special was just one part of our three-part podcast series, All Gassed Up. To hear the full series, you can find Sea Change wherever you get your podcasts.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
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TRANSCRIPT
HALLE: From New Orleans Public Radio, the Pulitzer Center and PRX, this is Sea Change, exploring climate change from the heart of America’s fossil fuel industry. I’m Halle Parker.
CARLYLE: And I’m Carlyle Calhoun. Right now in the US, there is a GAS BOOM – a liquified natural gas boom. The U.S. now produces more LNG than any other country in the world. And even more could be unleashed under the new administration.
HALLE: The more we heard about this booming industry, the more we wanted to know: what is LNG? And could it actually be a climate solution like the industry claims? So we launched a special investigation to find out.
CARLYLE: Over the next hour, we follow the journey of American gas around the world to see how LNG is expanding globally and what that means for the future of our warming planet.
HALLE: We start this story at home. In Louisiana. With a guy in a trailer, who’s pissed.
MUSIC
CARLYLE: Cameron Parish is tucked into the southwest corner of Louisiana. Most of it is wide open marsh and prairie.
HALLE: It’s the type of place where there are basically two choices on the radio: preachers preaching or french cajun music.
<<cajun music ambi>>
CARLYLE: I’m on my way to John Allaire’s place. [SFX car doors as bed] John’s in his late 60s, and a recently retired engineer. He’s tall, slim and serious.
CARLYLE: Hi, good to meet you.
JOHN: Great to meet you too. You've got a mosquito on your forehead.
CARLYLE In fact, I am being swarmed by mosquitos.
JOHN: You want some bug spray? This is Cameron Cologne.
CARLYLE: What'd you call it?
JOHN: Cameron Cologne. Deep Woods Off.
CARLYLE: We douse ourselves in bug spray and then he shows me around. John’s owned his land for 25 years. It’s his family’s slice of paradise. … about 300 acres sitting right on the Gulf of Mexico.
These days, he stays in a one-bedroom travel trailer. He used to have a house here, but it was destroyed by Hurricane Rita in 2005…just one of the many hurricanes that has hammered this area.
JOHN: My property goes out that way almost a mile. There’s a great egret, no that’s an ibis, a white-faced ibis right there.
CARLYLE: There are birds everywhere.
JOHN: Oh this is nothing compared to what it normally is. There goes an egret that was on the bridge fishing.
Carlyle: if you look in this direction, it basically looks like wilderness. you know, it's beautiful. There’s marsh.
John: It's wetlands. It's a protected estuary.
CARLYLE: But then we turn around …and it’s a literal and figurative 180. Less than a mile away, and in easy view… is this massive industrial facility sitting at the mouth of the Calcasieu River pressed up against the Gulf. It’s almost 1,000 acres of concrete and pipes, a maze of metal structures in a sea of…not much else.
JOHN: I've shown you the photographs of what it looks like at night. I mean, it's just, it looks like you're looking at Las Vegas. There's the noise. You can smell it. So it's, uh, way different than it was three or four years ago before all that was there.
CARLYLE: John can’t believe how quickly this paradise is disappearing. How quickly it has become a frontline for climate change…and ground zero for the LNG boom. He thinks what these facilities are doing could destroy the Gulf Coast, and that they’re poisoning people in his community.
And, he says, nobody seems to care.
JOHN: It's discouraging. I mean, you know, you got the east coast, the west coast, and we're now the new carbon coast.
HALLE: The Gulf Coast has been home to the oil and gas industry for a long time. And so it was a prime location to quickly become the hub of America’s natural gas export industry.
CARLYLE: Here’s how it happened. About 20 years ago, fossil fuel companies figured out a way to make an old technology a lot more efficient. It’s called hydraulic fracturing. Suddenly, Industry could tap into America’s huge reserves of natural gas–deep below the earth’s surface. Fracking really took off in the Obama years.
OBAMA: Turns out we are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas. We’ve got a lot of it
HALLE: Fossil fuel companies became flush with natural gas. More than we needed here in the U.S. And so they started looking for places to sell it. Within a decade, the U.S. went from a net importer of gas to the world’s largest exporter.
But, there was a hurdle they had to overcome first. Usually, within the U.S. we move natural gas through pipelines, but companies needed to find a way to get their gas across vast oceans to new markets.
CARLYLE: Enter LNG. It’s natural gas like your stove might burn, but supercooled. As the gas cools, it condenses into a liquid. Making it small enough to load up in tanks on giant ships.
Big energy companies went looking for a home base to ship American gas overseas…and leaders on the Gulf Coast welcomed them with open arms. There are now 5 LNG plants already operating with close to 2 dozen more in the works...all concentrated along just 100 miles of coastal Texas and Louisiana.
Carlyle: John Allaire, LNG’s next-door neighbor, isn’t the only one paying attention to this LNG bonanza. National environmental groups are worried too:
<<Hey, hey, Hoho, L and G has got to go. Hey, hey Ho ho. LNG has got to go.>>
HALLE: In January 2024, there was a convention of oil and gas execs in New Orleans. People from across the Gulf Coast gathered to protest … even Jane Fonda showed up to support them:
FONDA: I had no idea. I’m so sorry you have to deal with this…stuff
HALLE: Addressing the crowd, the actress admitted that she didn’t realize the scale of the problem until she saw the plants looming over the horizon.
JANE FONDA: It's like driving into Manhattan at night when you approach these structures. And then you realize they're right on beaches, they're next to communities, next to homes. It feels like looking into the devil's eyes.
HALLE: Activists are worried LNG could not only harm the Gulf Coast, but could spell climate disaster. And recent scientific research backs that up.
A little chemistry lesson here: the core component of gas is methane. When methane’s burned, it does release less carbon dioxide than coal.
CARLYLE: But, turns out, a lot of methane gas isn’t being burned before it enters the atmosphere. Deep investigations have found that the natural gas industry is very. leaky. Methane escapes during drilling, from pipelines and even out of facilities. At every step.
Debbie Gordon is a researcher with the Rocky Mountain Institute. She says, all that leaking methane kills that “clean” brand.
DEBBIE: Gas has to leak below 0.2 percent in order to be less damaging to the climate than coal. // The international community is agreeing on it, EPA is talking about it // industries agreeing on it.
HALLE: Only 0.2 percent of methane can leak, she says. But recent satellite data shows a huge range of leakage. From .6% up to 66%. Of leaking methane. And that’s just in the U.S. The gas industry is trying to clean up the system but that’s a long way off.
New research suggests LNG, over its lifetime, could actually be even worse than coal. One study found as much as a third worse.
CARLYLE: Activists pressured the Biden Administration to stop spreading this climate-polluting fuel around the world. To stop using the Gulf Coast as America’s LNG export base, And it seemed to work.
DEMOCRACY NOW: In a victory for the climate movement…
MSNBC: The Biden administration paused approvals for massive fossil fuel projects, specifically liquified natural gas.
CNBC 2: A pause that sees the climate crisis for what it is the existential threat of our time
HALLE: Basically: until further notice, the White House froze any new gas export development along the Gulf Coast.
CARLYLE: Here’s the question the U.S. now faces: if the world is transitioning away from fossil fuels, do we really need all this natural gas?
Depends on who you ask. From the beginning of the fracking boom, natural gas was framed as a climate solution. Fossil fuel companies, political leaders, even some environmental groups all pitched natural gas to the public as a bridge fuel… a cleaner option than coal that we can burn while we build out renewables like solar and wind.
T. BOONE PICKENS: So what you have is natural gas is the bridge fuel. Is the way I see it.
HALLE: That’s T. Boone Pickens, an American fossil fuel billionaire. In 2012, T. Boone did a Ted Talk about this “natural gas bridge”.
But in his talk, he exposed the industry's real agenda behind the bridge fuel argument.
PICKENS: I don’t have to worry about the bridge to where at my age. That’s your concern. But when you look at the natural gas we have, it could very well be the bridge to natural gas because you have plenty of natural gas.
HALLE: Yep, in what might have been a very honest moment, T. Boone Pickens says that the so-called natural gas bridge never ends. It just leads to more natural gas.
CARLYLE: So this LNG frenzy has landed squarely in the laps of coastal Lousianians. And perhaps nowhere more than rural Cameron Parish. It could soon be home to a third of the Gulf Coast’s LNG export terminals.
DNR MODERATOR: Please remember that the purpose of this public hearing is for DNR to receive your comments… concerning the coastal use…
HALLE: In 2023, Louisiana’s Department of Energy and Natural Resources held a public hearing in Cameron about a new LNG plant. And John Allaire was there to speak out against it.
JOHN: That marsh is going to be gone, the wetlands are going to be gone, the estuaries are going to be covered up with these concrete monuments.
HALLE: A company called Venture Global built and operates that huge LNG plant in John’s neighborhood -- the one you can see from his home. This hearing is about a new Venture Global LNG plant… it would be built right next to the other one. And if approved, CP2 will be the biggest export terminal in the country.
JOHN: People are talking about // (plop) no visible problem (plop) with the Venture global. (plop)
HALLE: At the speaker’s podium, John’s dumping big ole bags of mud taken from his property. He says the muck lined the beach after Venture Global dredged it for construction.
JOHN: I have buckets of free samples of it out in my truck if you want black viscous mud. The whole area, that whole beachfront is ruined.
HALLE: John Allaire isn’t just a disgruntled neighbor. He’s a retired environmental engineer who spent his career at BP and other oil and gas companies. In recent years, he’s become increasingly worried about climate change. And he’s especially angry about how Venture Global operates.
But at this public hearing, John is in the minority. Most are here to support more LNG plants.
Zeke Wainwright: I support Venture Global and its expansion and all LNGs in our area
MELISSA: I work for Portford Construction, cleaning the offices on-site. Venture Global has made my employment possible.
MARY NUNEZ: We have been the forgotten town for so long. // Cameron needs this to survive and prosper.
CARLYLE: This area of Louisiana was home to the state’s first-ever oil platform built in 1937. In recent decades though, jobs in oil and gas here have plummeted. For many, this new business of LNG feels like the return of an old, familiar friend — one that could help this place live on.
JOHN: So I'm here. This is where the Venture Global facility is sitting right now. And they want to expand it back into here.
CARLYLE: Back at John’s place, we’re in the kitchen. Spread out across the table are all sorts of public records that he's gathered about Venture Global’s LNG facility just a mile away.
CARLYLE: He reads from the permit that spells out the kinds of pollution the plant is allowed to release.
JOHN: You got sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxide, they're emitting carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, (…1, 3 butadiene, acetaldehyde, acrylin, benzene…)
CARLYLE: When fracked natural gas arrives on the Gulf Coast,, it’s full of chemicals. LNG plants are allowed to burn off a small amount of these chemicals — in huge flares, right into the air. Venture Global’s permit allows for the equivalent of just two and a half days a year of flaring.
CARLYLE: John pulls out a recent photograph.
JOHN: This was taken earlier this year.
CARLYLE: Where’d you take this?
JOHN: From my patio here.
CARLYLE: John has almost a daily diary of flares. Hundreds of time stamped photos captured by a special camera.
HALLE: Venture Global has violated its permit to pollute thousands of times. As a result, the state of Louisiana slapped the company with a compliance order. We sent Venture Global multiple requests for comment, and we asked for a tour of the facility. The company never responded.
CARLYLE: Venture Global denies any wrongdoing. It also hasn’t stopped this breakneck pace of pollution. In fact, at the same time the company is challenging the state’s compliance order, it’s also asking regulators to change its permit… to allow it to release more pollution.
JOHN: It's 833 percent over what they said they were going to do in the initial project, you know.
CARLYLE: I ask John what ups ets him the most about the LNG expansion that has arrived on his doorstep.
JOHN: It's the whole thing. It's the short term planning thing. The short term get it out of the ground as fast as we can sell it to the highest bidder. I mean, that's our plan. Uh, we have, no concern for the environment down here.
CARLYLE: Or the impact this pollution might be having on the health of people who live nearby.
TRAVIS: It seemed like at times we'd wake up in the morning gasping for air. That's not supposed to happen.
HALLE: Travis Dardar is a shrimper, and a member of the Jean Charles Choctaw Nation. Travis and his family used to live in Cameron Parish, in a trailer right on the coast. Venture Global built their LNG plant less than a mile from their home. And in 2021 when the plant came online, Travis says he, his wife and their kids all got sick. They were coughing, they had headaches.
TRAVIS: Obviously, there were chemicals coming out of that place since day one. That thing leaked like a basket.
CARLYLE: It’s difficult to attribute a specific case of an illness to air pollution, but long-term exposure to emissions like methane can cause cardiovascular, neurological and respiratory issues.
HALLE: Travis became a loud critic of Venture Global and that’s how we first started talking to him. At that protest we told you about earlier — the one in New Orleans when Jane Fonda jeered at the oil and gas execs — Travis took the mic there too.
TRAVIS: These people over here, the decisions that they made, for which our fishermen are paying the price, that's bulls**t. // We're still gonna try to give them hell before we leave.
HALLE: At one point, Travis went on local TV news and said that Venture Global’s pollution was making his family sick. The next day, there was a business card on his windshield. From a Venture Global representative. The company made an offer to buy his house.
TRAVIS: The hell you want me to do with that? Bud, get out of here.
HALLE: Travis had no interest in being uprooted again. He already had to escape his first home that was lost to erosion and rising seas. His family fled 200 miles away, here to Cameron.
TRAVIS: I went to Cameron, nothing but the clothes on my back, a carton of cigarettes. They dropped me on the boat. I went to work. I worked day and night. A few weeks later, I done bought a trailer. I worked hard for that, for that land I had in Cameron. Can't nobody take that from me, you know.
HALLE: So when that Venture Global rep offered to buy Travis’ home in Cameron, Travis sent him packing. For two years, Travis led protests, he talked to reporters, he spoke up at public meetings. All the while, Venture Global kept offering to buy his house.
But eventually… he agreed. Not just because of the money but Travis and his family were tired of feeling sick… and his wife’s health had taken a turn.
TRAVIS: At that point, Nicole had a heart attack. You know, we suffered there so long. So, so long. And I was done.
HALLE: Since moving an hours’ drive from the facility, Travis says things have gotten better.
TRAVIS: It’s like we can breathe again.
CARLYLE: The United States is the world’s biggest natural gas exporter. But It comes at a cost.
For folks here on the Gulf Coast… there's pollution and displacement. Hundreds and hundreds of acres of wetlands destroyed.
For the rest of America: exporting all this gas can actually raise utility bills. The U.S. Energy Information Administration, basically the federal government’s top energy data nerds, found that sending more American gas overseas means Americans pay more for energy..
HALLE:. Meanwhile, Venture Global and other LNG companies are making record profits.
HALLE: So if we are getting the pollution, and higher, unpredictable energy prices…and none of this LNG. Who is all of this for?
CARLYLE: We catch a glimpse of the answer from outside John Allaire’s place in Cameron Parish.
JOHN: There's an LNG tanker going out right now. You see that red on the top?
CARLYLE: John points to a ship heading out the mouth of the river, into the open Gulf. We pull up an app on my phone that shows all boat traffic…
CARLYLE: You think it's that right there, that yellow one?
JOHN: Yep. it’ll say its, uh, destination is Poland. ETA December 16th is their arrival status underway.
HALLE: After the break… we follow the gas…to Europe, where we find out why the continent, with all its lofty climate goals, is now importing huge volumes of American natural gas.
CONSTANTIN: This is not about energy security in Europe or in Germany. This is about companies making big money. They want to make cash.
HALLE: Stay with us.
Segment 2
CARLYLE: From New Orleans Public Radio, the Pulitzer Center and PRX, this is Sea Change. A special broadcast about climate change from the heart of America’s fossil fuel industry. I’m Carlyle Calhoun.
HALLE: And I’m Halle Parker.
STEFFI: Quack, quack, quack. Now you see the ducks, it's not gooses, they are smaller.
HALLE: That’s Steffi Eilers quacking, she’s the head of a local environmental group. We’re with her in a small port city in northern Germany called Wilhelmshaven. It almost feels like we’re back in coastal Louisiana.
STEFFI: The Wadden Sea at the moment is low tide. So we can see the migratory birds and the seagulls eating the shells that are here in the mud in the front. At the moment the sun is rising.
CARLYLE: Just like back in Louisiana, Wilhelmshaven has a mix of wild, protected nature preserves smack up next to big industry. We see the familiar sight of oil refineries, although here, they’re backdropped by wind turbines.
HALLE: And now, just in front of us, another familiar sight.
CARLYLE: And it looks like there's actually an LNG tanker here.
STEFFI: Yes, it came yesterday, and it came direct from Savannah.
HALLE: Savannah… Georgia. We watch as the tanker unloads American gas.
CARLYLE: If Louisiana is ground zero for the American export boom, this is ground zero for the German import boom.
After the ship unloads here, the supercooled LNG is reheated and sent down pipelines into Germany… and the rest of Europe. But just how much American LNG is coming here?
JOCHEN: That's all the ships, the green and red.
CARLYLE: We found someone who knew the answer. Jochen Martin was a sailor for 30 years and then a ship captain. We gather around his computer in his apartment kitchen in Wilhelmshaven) and he pulls up a world map with thousands of tiny arrows in a rainbow of colors.
We start counting the LNG ships.
CARLYLE: That's the first one that came?
JOCHEN: That was the first one, yeah.
JOCHEN: From Sabine Pass.
HALLE: Sabine Pass. It’s an LNG plant in Cameron Parish, Louisiana. It’s currently the largest export terminal in the world.
JOCHEN: Freeport
CARLYLE: Texas.
JOCHEN: Cameron.
HALLE: Louisiana.
JOCHEN: Eleven. Lake Charles.
HALLE: Louisiana.
JOCHEN: Yeah, fourteen.
HALLE: Since Russia invaded Ukraine, the U.S. has sent close to 200 LNG ships to Germany. Nearly all of them from the Gulf Coast. That’s according to the marine database kpler.
CARLYLE: Before the war, very little US LNG came to Europe. Last year, more than 80% of Germany’s LNG came from the US. Enough gas to power almost a fifth of German homes for a year.
HALLE: This massive ramp up in American gas imports… it was pitched to the German public as a bridge. Yep… there’s that idea again. A temporary bridge to the future… in this case, away from Russian gas imports.
HALLE: Steffi Eilers is skeptical.
HALLE: Some of the things that I've read is that this terminal is supposed to be temporary. Do you think that that's true?
STEFFI: No.
HALLE: Why is that?
STEFFI: We're addicted to gas.
MUX IN
CARLYLE: When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it set off a global energy crisis. Because Russia was Europe’s biggest supplier of natural gas.
HALLE: After Russia invaded Ukraine, European countries hit Putin with a ton of sanctions and Putin struck back.
ARCHIVAL: Russia is shutting down gas supplies from a major pipeline to Europe.
ARCHIVAL: Europe is already bracing for what could be a long, cold winter.
CARLYLE: The crisis hit hardest in Germany, Russia’s biggest customer. Political leaders wanted off Russian gas. The country needed new sources of gas. FAST.
HALLE: By this point, after years of building out massive liquified natural gas terminals along the Gulf Coast, the U.S. was flush with gas and ready to export it. President Joe Biden said the U.S. could help save Europe… by selling them LNG.
BIDEN: We are coming together to reduce Europe’s dependence on Russian energy.
MUX UP AND DOWN
HALLE: Even though Germany has some of the most ambitious climate goals in the world, the country still burns A LOT of natural gas and Germany was eager to start importing massive amounts of LNG, exported from America’s Gulf Coast.
Here’s how they did it. Despite the country’s lengthy, highly regulated process for installing new energy infrastructure — they passed a law that basically waived all of those rules.
CARLYLE: And it was one guy's job to make it happen. The architect of Germany’s energy overhaul. Bengt Bergt, the deputy speaker for energy and climate of the Social Democrat Party. And, he agreed to a meeting with us:
BENGT: I have two main responsibilities on the one hand wind power. And on the other hand, the natural gas infrastructure.
CARLYLE: These days, a quarter of German energy comes from wind power. But Bengt says making that happen hasn’t been easy.
BENGT: So every windmill in Germany, every windmill, we have 30,000, had a lawsuit on it. Every single one.
CARLYLE: with so many layers of bureaucracy designed to slow down new energy projects… Bengt’s job was to figure out how to build massive new LNG import terminals… fast.
BENGT: And we introduced something we call the Überragende Öffentliche Interesse,
CARLYLE: Will you say that one again?
BENGT: Yeah. Überragendes öffentliches Interesse.
CARLYLE: In English, the LNG Acceleration Act. The German Parliament narrowly passed it. The law stripped away environmental reviews, public comment… all kinds of protections meant to ensure energy projects are done correctly. The result: brand new LNG import terminals built in record time.
BENGT: Germany is a big gas tanker, but we are moving it like a speedboat right now.
HALLE: But after all that fast-tracking, Germany didn’t end up needing much LNG. The fear of running out of energy after Russia invaded Ukraine led citizens and industry to use less of it.
The German public took notice, and so did politicians. Germany initially planned a dozen LNG import terminals, then Parliament cut that back to just five.
CONSTANTIN: This is not about energy security in Europe or in Germany. This is about companies making big money. They want to make cash.
HALLE: That’s Constantin Zerger, a leader of Environmental Action Germany – the country’s largest environmental organization.
CARLYLE: He rejects this whole idea that the U.S. saved Germany from its reliance on Russian gas. He says that for years before the war, American fossil fuel companies tried relentlessly to open the door to the European market, to sell American LNG to countries like Germany. But Europe didn’t bite. They had cheap Russian gas after all.
HALLE: The war in Ukraine gave those same fossil fuel companies a battering ram to enter the European market.
CONSTANTIN: Everybody knew that you can't really invest into new fossil infrastructure. Time's gone. So for them, this is an unexpected opportunity to prolong the lifetime of their business model.
CARLYLE: Constantin’s talking about US oil and gas companies. But they’re not the only ones capitalizing on this moment. German companies and banks are also invested.
All those new export terminals on the Gulf Coast? — the ones neighbors say are poisoning them, destroying coastal wilderness… German banks are helping finance it all.
HALLE: Not only that, German companies are also signing long-term contracts with US LNG companies that lock them into buying US gas for 15-20 years…long after Germany plans to be off fossil fuels. Yet, Constantin says even the German government is supporting these contracts.
CONSTANTIN: It's an open contradiction to the climate targets we have set. // So, it’s like a domino game. We are building import terminals here. Our companies are signing contracts. Our banks are financing export terminals, and we end up with a fossil system that's just prolonging its lifetime when it should actually die out.
KATHRIN: Today we have representatives of Louisiana and Texas who are struggling against the new LNG facilities…
HALLE: While we were reporting in Germany, some members of the German Parliament hosted a trio of Texas women. They’re from the heart of oil and gas country, and they’re on a crusade across Europe to oppose the LNG expansion on the Gulf Coast.
One of the women is Rebekah Hinojosa. She tells the room of German politicians that there was a field right next to her University of North Texas college campus where gas was fracked.
REBEKAH: The drill went underneath the campus. An environmental organization, uh, used a special camera called a flare camera and showed us a video of just toxic pollution being emitted into the dorms. So, as I'm being overburdened with student loan debt, I find out that I'm being continuously poisoned by the fracking industry.
CARLYLE: As we mentioned earlier, U.S. LNG comes from fracked gas. And while Germany is importing LNG by the boatload, Fracking is actually banned in Germany. Whereas Texas has banned BANS of fracking.
HALLE: The hypocrisy makes Rebekah mad. Mad enough to fly more than 5,000 miles to bring her concerns directly to the buyer. She sees Germany benefiting, while on the Gulf Coast, the oil and gas industry is building facilities that release harmful pollution near minority communities. She says Germany’s implicated in this.
REBEKAH: When countries like, like Germany import gas, specifically importing gas from sacred Native Indigenous lands, you are turning us into a fossil fuel extraction colony.
CARLYLE: These concerns from the Gulf Coast have gotten the attention of parliament members like Bengt Bergt. He says it’s not lost on him that Germany is supporting fracking by buying LNG from the US.
BENGT: I'm very, very keen on, taking care that the people don't suffer. If you have concerns regarding the society impact, the environmental impact or any impact you see, make it loud. We hear it in Germany.
HALLE: Bengt says Germany is changing. The country recently passed a law to penalize companies — like LNG importers — that violate environmental and human rights at any point in their supply chain. And, that while the country doubled down on fossil fuels, it also doubled down on renewable energy
BENGT: When you only see perhaps from the Louisiana perspective that Germany is the ones that caused now a export terminal to become existent. Please take a look beyond that. See that we are one of the countries that have already now the highest production of renewable energy. We want to exceed that massively.
HALLE: For the first time last year, Germany produced more than half of the country’s energy from renewables. Solar and wind projects are popping off. At the same time, Germany is still receiving tanker after tanker of LNG. And will be for decades. LNG that they’re barely using.
CARLYLE: In fact, Germany plans to be entirely off LNG by the end of the decade. Which left us wondering, what happens when you lock yourself into buying something you no longer want? Where will all of that gas go, if not to Germany? Bengt puts it simply.
BENGT: Of course, there will be a redirection to other countries because other countries have other climate targets.
HALLE: So green Germany can just sell their gas to other countries that are still willing to burn it. Countries that are still developing. To the east.
CARLYLE: It's like a game of hot potato, but with carbon-emitting fossil fuels that have implications for the future of the earth.
HALLE: After the break, we follow American gas from Germany to Japan. Where we find out… Japan’s not the final destination either.
YASUKO: They want to be like a station to Asia, getting the gas from U.S., spreading to the Asian countries.
CARLYLE: Stay with us.
Segment 3
HALLE: From New Orleans Public Radio, the Pulitzer Center and PRX, this is Sea Change. A special broadcast about climate change from the heart of America’s fossil fuel industry. I’m Halle Parker.
CARLYLE: And I’m Carlyle Calhoun.
ABC: A day of historic devastation.
CARLYLE: On March 11, 2011, the coast of Japan was struck by one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded. Less than an hour later, a tsunami hit. A series of waves engulfed the coastline, some higher than 40 feet tall.
HALLE: Towns were wiped out as the waves pushed inland. More than 10,000 people died. And 60 miles south of the epicenter, it led to a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima.
CHANNEL 4 NEWS: Officials reported that radiation levels were 10 million times higher than normal.
JIM WALSH CNN: It qualifies as the second worst nuclear nuclear incident in the history of the nuclear age.
CARLYLE: The flooding caused the nuclear reactors at the Fukushima plant to overheat. The radiation leaked for months, poisoning the air, land and sea. Everything.
CARLYLE: The Fukushima nuclear disaster sent shockwaves through Japan’s energy system. Nuclear power quickly became public enemy No. 1. And what did Japan turn to?
HALLE: L.N.G. – Sound familiar? In times of energy upheaval, the LNG industry gets a boost. Just like what happened in Germany after Russia invaded Ukraine. But unlike Germany, Japan has a long history with LNG. You might call them the OG Sugar Daddy of LNG.
CARLYLE: Decades ago, when LNG was just a tiny industry, Japan became the world’s first big, reliable buyer. Japan’s money helped the industry grow.
So when Fukushima melted down, Japan already had the LNG importing infrastructure. But suddenly, it wanted a lot more natural gas. This is when Japan and the U.S. become LNG allies.
SENATOR DAN BLADE MORRIS: We know that the molecules of natural gas that are produced here in the United States will be delivered to homes, businesses, and generations for years to come throughout the country of Japan.
HALLE: This is Louisiana state senator Dan Blades Morris, and he’s speaking at the grand opening of Louisiana’s second LNG export plant in 2019. It’s in Cameron Parish, where our investigation started. Japan’s U.S. Ambassador was even there, Shinsuke Sugiyama.
SHINSUKE SUGIYAMA: This is only the beginning. Everywhere I go, I see growing economic relations between the U. S. and Japan.
CARLYLE: Yet, despite the excitement displayed in Cameron Parish 6 years ago, Japan’s gas consumption has actually gone DOWN. Investment in gas on the other hand, well, that’s way UP.
HALLE: Since Fukushima, Japan has doubled down on its sugar daddy status. The country’s utilities have bankrolled nearly 40 billion dollars – 40 billion! – on LNG infrastructure outside of Japan’s borders, all over the world. That’s according to an analysis by Oil Change International. It’s a lot of money. Especially for a country where gas demand is going down. So what is Japan’s big plan?
<<ambi saying hello>>
HALLE: I met Yasuko Suzuki and Satoko Endo in Tokyo, at a brown conference table surrounded by boxes of flyers and research. They work for environmental organizations that are hyper-focused on getting Japan and all of southeast Asia off fossil fuels.
Satoko tells me Japan has always had a cozy relationship with the fossil fuel industry. But as demand declines, the companies are thinking bigger.
SATOKO: They want to do the same thing that they did in Japan. // They want to build LNG facilities in Asia, and do // gas to power projects there and make profits.
CARLYLE: Japan wants to be the middleman. Buying LNG it doesn’t need and reselling it for profit. In 2022, Japanese companies traded about a QUARTER of all the LNG in the world. Yasuko says, both the gas industry and Japan’s government are targeting smaller, poorer southeast Asian countries like the Philippines and Vietnam.
YASUKO: The government try to, not push, but encourage to use the fossil fuel.
HALLE: Let’s take Vietnam for example. Yasuko says Japanese companies work with cities in Vietnam, helping them replace coal with LNG. The Japanese companies bankroll all the infrastructure to get LNG to these cities, and they even pay for gas-fired power plants — enabling a whole new energy system.
YASUKO: They want to be like a station to Asia, getting the gas from U.S., spreading to the Asian countries.
CARLYLE: Hooking these countries on Gulf Coast LNG.
Last year, Vietnam got its first-ever LNG import plant up and running – with the help of the Japanese gas giant, Tokyo Gas. And Tokyo Gas wants to add another import terminal in Vietnam by the end of the decade.
HALLE: Other Japanese gas companies are building the same kind of LNG infrastructure in the Philippines and India.
CARLYLE: And Japan is doing more than just helping build LNG plants and all this gas infrastructure across Asia. They’re also selling them that BIG IDEA – the same old debunked idea that natural gas is an important part of a cleaner future. <<elevator ambi>>
HALLE: I’m in an elevator, shooting up 9 floors in a tall, high-rise in Tokyo.
<<elevator talking, doors open, chatter>>
HALLE: When the doors open, several well-dressed Japanese men welcome me. We all exchange bows and greetings.
MAN: Welcome to Japan.
HALLE: I’m in the headquarters of the Japan Gas Association - it represents the country’s biggest players in the gas industry. And I’m here to understand their global strategy…
YOHEI: It's good to see you. And, I hope you are not suffering from jet lag because you came from Germany, right?
HALLE: Just a tiny bit.
HALLE: Yohei Kagawa is a spokesman for the group. He shares with me this slogan they’ve developed to sell American LNG to developing countries in Asia.
YOHEI: Go gas stainable. It means sustainable society with gas. So, gas, sustainable. So, we named this slogan gas stainable.
HALLE: Go gastainable. This whole idea… that started in the U.S. two decades ago, at the dawn of the fracking boom… that natural gas is a bridge fuel to a greener future.
YOHEI: From coal to natural gas, that's a realistic solution.
HALLE: The Japanese gas reps in this room tell me they see a future where they can keep burning gas. They say it’s no problem for the climate. Basically, their strategy? Forget bridge fuel. It’s a destination fuel.
Despite the cost to the climate, gas execs like the Japan Gas Association, are going full steam ahead with LNG expansion across Asia.
CARLYLE: So while LNG is becoming the de facto energy policy worldwide… and a network of LNG terminals are sprouting up on coastlines everywhere…surprisingly, the industry’s path to profit is not guaranteed.
SAM: LNG simply is too expensive to replace coal // and renewables are a much cheaper option.
CARLYLE: That’s Sam Reynolds, an analyst with the Institute of Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Sam tells us solar and wind are the cheapest energy options out there. Natural gas costs two times as much as solar and wind. And LNG? It’s the costliest form of gas.
SAM: Governments are starting to realize that regardless of what they think about LNG as a bridge fuel, it's not an affordable bridge fuel.
CARLYLE: Unless, that is, LNG infrastructure is subsidized–which is what Japanese companies are doing in countries like Vietnam. because they know they can’t compete dollar for dollar with solar and wind. And that is extending the life of LNG.
But countries still have a choice. Renewables or gas. And the direction these rapidly growing Asian countries go is one of the biggest determinants of our future climate.
HALLE: Back here at home… on a coast riddled with LNG export terminals, the stakes are high. And voices of protest throughout the country are getting louder.
Like in New York, where dozens staged a sit-in in front of Citi Bank, one of the world’s largest funders of fossil fuel expansion. The protesters were demanding that the bank stop paying for new LNG plants.
Chant: “Hey Citi, get off it. The planet over profit.”
HALLE: And protests like these are making waves.
CARLY: Last year, as we told you, a coordinated effort led by regular people on the Gulf Coast forced the federal government’s hand to halt LNG development.
NEWS ARCHIVAL: The Biden administration paused approvals for massive fossil fuel projects, specifically liquified natural gas.
HALLE:. In January 2024, the Biden Administration said it wanted to figure out LNG’s full climate impact before it approved any more export terminals on the Gulf Coast.
But that pause was short-lived.
News clip: “16 states including Texas, Louisiana and Alaska are fighting that pause arguing it’s illegal and it harms the states by reducing producing production of natural gas and revenue.”
CARLY: Only months into the pause, a Louisiana judge overturned it.
HALLE: And now, the Trump administration says they will expand oil and gas production and approve new LNG export terminals starting Day 1.
DONALD TRUMP: Drill baby, drill
Even without approving any new terminals, LNG will increase by about 80% in the next four years. But if the Trump administration’s expansion goes as promised, the carbon emissions from LNG exports could be greater than 1 thousand coal plants.
And the nation’s largest LNG export terminal will be John Allaire’s newest neighbor.
JOHN: We're on the beach front here. We're along the Gulf of Mexico here.
CARLYLE: We followed the trail of American natural gas all the way around the world. We’re gonna end it where we started… at John Allaire’s beachfront trailer back in Cameron Parish… looking out at a gigantic LNG plant.
HALLE: The demand for natural gas is declining in many parts of the world. And, if that trend continues globally, America’s LNG boom will go bust.
CARLYLE: The Gulf Coast has seen it happen before. The oil industry has abandoned 14,000 wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Many of those abandoned wells are still spewing oil and methane, and it’s on taxpayers to foot the bill for the cleanup.
That huge LNG plant that John can see from his front stoop? It may also be abandoned one day.
JOHN: Well, they'll be just big concrete monuments and these guys will go well You know, we're not making any money so we're gonna have to shut it down.
CARLYLE: John’s future view from his Gulf Front property could one day be haunted by the toxic remains of industry. He says his property has already changed a lot since he bought it 25 years ago.
JOHN: See where that wave is right there just broke out in front of us. That's where the trees used to be.
CARLYLE: Where we're looking out into the Gulf of Mexico. That was land?
JOHN: Yes. Well, you could walk from right here. Take 70 steps out that way. When I first bought the property, that was land.
CARLYLE: Sea levels are rising in the Gulf of Mexico at one of the fastest rates on earth. In Louisiana, land is washing away.
And then there are the hurricanes. More and more of them, and they’re getting stronger. Hurricanes. sometimes pushing 17-foot-high walls of water ashore.
HALLE: Venture Global’s LNG plant in Cameron Parish is above sea level, but barely – only by around 5 feet. Venture Global built storm walls at the export terminals. It’s required.
But reports show the strongest hurricanes, similar to what we’ve had here in recent years, could still flood this LNG plant.
And a flood could cause explosions. Toxic chemicals could flood out of the facilities into fragile wetlands, and into people’s homes.
CARLYLE: Looking out with John into the breaking waves of the Gulf, where trees grew not too long ago, I wonder if at the end of the day, what determines the future of these LNG plants isn’t whether they make economic sense but the reality of climate change itself.
HALLE: Because climate change doesn’t pick and choose. It destroys everything in its path. Maybe… even the industry that created it.
CREDITS
CARLYLE: Thanks for listening to Sea Change. This 1-hour special was hosted, written and reported by me, Halle Parker and me Carlyle Calhoun. It was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center. This special was edited by Johanna Zorn and Jack Rodolico. Our sound designer is Emily Jankowski. And our theme music is by Jon Batiste.This special was just one part of our three-part podcast series, All Gassed Up. To hear the full series, you can find Sea Change wherever you get your podcasts.
Sea Change is a WWNO and WRKF production. We are part of the NPR Podcast Network and distributed by PRX.
Sea Change is made possible with major support from the Gulf Research Program of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. WWNO’s Coastal Desk is supported by the Walton Family Foundation, the Meraux Foundation, and the Greater New Orleans Foundation.
