By Maria Gallucci
“We don’t have exploding refineries here, and we want to keep it that way,” Hinojosa says from her office in downtown Brownsville, on a stretch of semi-vacant storefronts just blocks from the border crossing. “What we want to see instead is support for renewable energy that is led by the community.”
Hinojosa’s family has lived in the Rio Grande Valley for generations. In her previous job at the Sierra Club, she helped mount a yearslong effort to block a third proposed export terminal, called Annova LNG, through legal actions and by pressuring international banks and potential European customers not to support the project. In 2021, the developer scrapped its plans after failing to secure long-term offtake contracts.
“Our communities don’t want to be sacrificed. We don’t want these projects here or anywhere else.”
Now, LNG opponents are working to block the two other export terminals slated for the area as well as the gas pipelines that will feed them, hoping to stop the construction trucks in their tracks before the projects advance further. Most recently, on February 27, members of the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe and environmental groups visited New York City to protest outside the headquarters of Global Infrastructure Partners, the largest investor in Rio Grande LNG. Activists brought wetland samples from the Texas construction site and a letter demanding that the private equity firm withdraw its support for the project.
“Our communities don’t want to be sacrificed,” Hinojosa tells me. “We don’t want these projects here or anywhere else.”
The fight to determine the future of South Texas is escalating just as the broader debate over LNG exports heats up in Washington, D.C. and nationwide.
In late January, the Biden administration said it was pausing all pending decisions on new LNG-export approvals. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will take a “hard look” at how those fossil-fuel shipments impact climate change, domestic energy prices and America’s energy security—for the first time since the LNG export boom began eight years ago.
The announcement was widely celebrated by climate activists and Democratic lawmakers, who have accused the DOE and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) of “rubber-stamping” LNG projects with minimal scrutiny. The decision also garnered support from a group of manufacturers, chemical companies and consumer advocates, who say that exporting America’s gas supply could make energy markets more volatile at home.
Meanwhile, fossil-fuel lobbyists and pro-LNG lawmakers from both political parties have blasted the Biden administration’s move as a “reckless” political ploy, one that undermines U.S. energy security and hurts European allies trying to wean themselves off Russian gas. The Republican-controlled House recently passed a bill to overturn the LNG export pause; while unlikely to pass in the Senate, the bill earned praise from the head of Texas’ oil and gas regulatory commission.
The temporary pause is expected to last for months, and it will primarily affect the six major proposed LNG export terminals waiting to secure approvals from FERC, DOE or both. But the Biden administration’s decision doesn’t impact any of the nation’s eight active facilities—which together made the United States the world’s largest LNG exporter last year. Since February 2016, when the lower 48 states first began exporting LNG, the amount of U.S. fossil gas shipped overseas has risen from near zero to 88.9 million metric tons in 2023.
When burned, fossil gas emits about half as much carbon dioxide as coal. However, gas is primarily composed of methane—a potent greenhouse gas whose near-term warming power is many times that of CO2. Methane is prone to leak throughout its complex supply chain, from the gas well to the power plant that burns it, further increasing the fuel’s life-cycle emissions.
The net climate impact of exporting LNG ultimately depends on whether the fuel is displacing cleaner renewables or dirtier coal in the importing countries—and on the types of measures companies take to prevent methane leaks at every step, Arvind Ravikumar, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, recently wrote in MIT Tech Review.
Even so, scientists are clear that over the long term, gas production is “inconsistent” with the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In South Texas, the two LNG export terminals and two gas pipelines could together generate about as much greenhouse gas emissions as driving about 40.4 million cars per year, according to the Sierra Club.
Each facility also represents a major potential source of air pollution; together, their cumulative impacts on air quality would be significant. The Rio Grande LNG terminal alone is expected to spew thousands of tons per year of carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides, as well as hundreds of tons of volatile organic compounds. The chemicals can cause neurological effects like headaches and dizziness, damage people’s lungs and trigger asthma attacks, and contribute to soot and smog.
Emma Guevara, the Sierra Club’s Brownsville organizer, says these public-health threats are even more concerning when considering that many people in the Rio Grande Valley lack access to affordable, high-quality health care. In the four-county region, between 24 and 33 percent of residents under 65 lack health insurance, compared to 9.8 percent nationwide.
“We’re already one of the most underserved areas in the entire United States,” she says, adding a direct plea to fossil-fuel companies: “Please don’t come into our already very marginalized community and try to play in this place.”
Back on the palm-tree-lined streets of downtown Brownsville, when I meet Bekah Hinojosa at her shared office space, she shows me a stack of photocopied forms with handwritten entries in English and Spanish. The organizer has been gathering and translating public comments about the Rio Bravo Pipeline to submit to FERC. On the forms, residents write their concerns that the pipeline and LNG terminal could drain water supplies in a region prone to drought. They worry about dirty air. They wonder about the projects’ proximity to SpaceX’s launchpad—recent launch attempts shook buildings as far as several towns away and flung debris onto the surrounding area.
Along with collecting comments, Hinojosa says she and fellow organizers are meeting regularly with financial institutions, including the Washington State Investment Board, or protesting outside their headquarters—like the most recent action in New York City—to try to dissuade would-be financiers and insurance companies from supporting the LNG developments, a tactic that proved effective with the now-canceled Annova LNG terminal.
Maria Gallucci is a senior reporter at Canary Media. She covers emerging clean energy technologies and efforts to electrify transportation and decarbonize heavy industry.
Source: canarymedia.com, February 28, 2024.