The Biden-Harris administration may have based its decision to freeze certain liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects upon a major act of deception, according to a government watchdog group.
The Department of Energy (DOE) announced the pause on new and pending approvals for certain LNG export terminals in January, stating that it must conduct a review of potential environmental, economic and security impacts of LNG exports to ensure that approving new capacity is still in the public interest. An ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legal battle between the agency and an independent group called Government Accountability and Oversight (GAO) reveals that the administration may have actually conducted — or started to conduct — such a review in 2023 before effectively burying it because it may have been producing politically inconvenient conclusions, according to GAO.
If GAO is correct, the Biden-Harris administration essentially deceived the public in an election year to institute a policy that undermines American geopolitical interests, chills investment in domestic energy projects and greatly pleases the well-funded environmentalist lobby which is spending big to help Democrats in this election cycle. The DOE did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story.
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GAO filed a narrowly-tailored FOIA request with DOE in June seeking any LNG export study transmitted by the National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) to the DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management between Jan. 1, 2023 and Oct. 31, 2023. The group also requested any emails transmitting those documents from NETL to the same DOE sub-office.
The FOIA request has since become the subject of a GAO lawsuit against the DOE. During the legal battle, the DOE eventually conceded that there are 97 documents, totaling thousands of pages, in its possession that potentially meet the parameters GAO set forth in its request targeting studies about LNG exports.
Moreover, the federal government has delayed the process by “asking for timeline extensions, ignoring deadlines, filing motions to stay adjudication and seeking to further delay by consolidating several individual GAO FOIA actions into one complex case,” Chris Horner, one of GAO’s attorneys, told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“GAO has already won in the key sense that it forced a stonewalling DOE to at long last admit that, yes, there is a 2023 study meeting that description, it was sent to the senior political appointees in the Biden-Harris DOE, and has disappeared into the ether,” Horner told the DCNF. “The page volume that DOE admits to confirms that this study was indeed very far along—why else would it have made it to the top politicals—and possibly, as we were informed, completed before being buried.”
The freeze was widely seen as part of the Biden-Harris administration’s climate crusade. Economically and geopolitically, the freeze has heightened uncertainty for would-be investors in major infrastructure projects while empowering LNG production in foreign countries with lower environmental standards, such as Russia and Qatar.
Notably, NETL has previously conducted reviews of the emissions impacts of LNG exports in 2014 and 2019, finding both times that American LNG exports to Asia and Europe do not create more lifecycle emissions than regionally-mined coal when used to generate power.
Republicans and other critics — including some Democrats — charge that the moratorium is also undermining U.S. interests by inhibiting America’s ability to exert influence and potentially degrading long-term energy security in Europe and Ukraine, which the U.S. has given $175 billion amid its war with Russia.
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