This story was published in partnership with Rolling Stone.

Ballenas o gas mural created by artists Karla Antuna and Elti; photo courtesy of the Whales or Gas campaign in Mexico, where activists are protesting an LNG export terminal that would threaten a globally significant whale nursery.

In December, the Biden administration quietly announced the finalization of its long-awaited study on liquefied natural gas, or LNG, exports. While Joe Biden is no longer president, the study’s release could complicate President Donald Trump’s plan to “drill, baby, drill,” as environmental advocates believe the findings will aid their efforts to fight LNG export permits in court.

Conducted by the Department of Energy (DOE), the study was the planned end point of the administration’s “LNG pause,” which put permits for certain types of LNG export terminals on hold until their climate and economic impact could be better understood. Contradicting the Biden administration's own moves on LNG, the study found that more LNG export terminals were not necessary to meet global demand for the fuel and would lead to increases in both domestic energy prices and greenhouse gas emissions.

“The Biden administration and Secretary [of Energy] Granholm ended up being much more critical of LNG than we would have anticipated a year ago,” says Alan Zibel, research director for energy and environmental issues at the nonprofit Public Citizen.

Meanwhile, the new administration seems set to approve any LNG project that comes its way, if Trump’s executive orders on energy are to be followed. In addition to requiring a review of all environmental policies, the orders mandate drilling everywhere, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, eliminating the electric vehicle mandate, banning wind energy, and revoking all of Biden’s climate-related executive orders. Regarding LNG, Trump directed the Energy Secretary to “restart reviews of applications for approvals of liquefied natural gas export projects as expeditiously as possible.”

It is yet to be seen how Chris Wright, Trump’s nominee for Energy Secretary and CEO of the fracking company Liberty Energy, will interpret the DOE findings. Wright has previously claimed that climate change is not contributing to an increase in extreme weather events, and has championed the idea that natural gas is both environmentally preferable to coal and could lift the world out of poverty. In an interview with Drilled last year, Wright said decarbonization was inevitable in the long run but impossible in the next 20 to 30 years.

“We've been decarbonizing for 150 years from wood to coal to oil to natural gas to nuclear,” he says. “Natural gas probably becomes the dominant hydrocarbon in the energy system 100 years from now; it's much lower greenhouse gas emissions, and with technology it will probably be much easier to inject underground or nature-based absorptions of it. I do think we will ultimately get to net zero greenhouse gas emissions if climate is a pressing problem, and it looks like it's worth the investment. But in 100 years, that's probably not that hard to do. In the next 10, 20, or 30 years? We just simply don't have a viable pathway.”

Irrespective of Wright’s views or Trump’s executive orders, advocacy groups say the DOE study provides a strong basis to challenge LNG export permits in court.

The study reached four noteworthy conclusions:

Tyson Slocum, director of Public Citizen's Energy and Climate Program, explains that exports of natural gas to countries with which the U.S. does not have a free trade agreement — i.e. 90 percent of the country’s LNG exports — can only occur if there is a finding that those exports are consistent with public interest. “The DOE report is a formal, public-interest assessment of the impacts of public interest in expanding LNG exports.” Slocum, along with other parties, has legally intervened in the various Department of Energy proceedings where applications to export LNG are being evaluated.

“It seems clear that they looked at the evidence and saw some serious risks of overbuilding LNG exports,” Zibel says. “Because what's already been approved is insane. We're talking about the fourth wave of these things. Wave one is built, wave two is being built, wave three is approved, these are facilities that would come online way down the road, in five, six, seven years.”

Trump visits the Cameron LNG export facility in the Gulf of Mexico during his first term.

The new analysis “reflects the realities of climate science and the testimony of communities near these massive LNG projects,” says Allie Rosenbluth, U.S. campaign manager at Oil Change International.

Part of what makes the study so groundbreaking is its methodology. The DOE used a new model of the global economy and energy system that enabled it to look at how increased LNG exports would impact the demand for different energy sources — and for renewables in particular. This is a major shift from previous reports where the DOE simply assumed that U.S. LNG exports compete with coal or gas from other countries, and estimated the different lifecycle emissions of these competing fossil fuels. The agency had not looked at whether LNG exports compete with renewable energy.

“This has been part of our critique of the DOE assessments for many years,” Rosenbluth points out.

Many interests, including those with a financial stake in seeing the LNG export pause lifted, have been pushing other narratives. S&P Global, an American company that deals in financial information and analyses, released a study on the same day as the DOE. Using a different methodology, one that largely rests on previous S&P Global findings, the conclusions of that report underscored the LNG industry’s positive contribution to GDP and job creation in the U.S. and claimed that exports have “no major impact” on domestic natural gas prices. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a longtime proponent of climate skepticism and frequent supporter of the fossil fuel industry, put its weight behind the S&P Global study, calling the Biden administration’s findings  “politically-driven.”

Slocum pointed to blind spots in the S&P Global report. “The report ignores discrete impacts that LNG exports have had in exacerbating supply-demand imbalances, particularly during extreme weather events when we see an upward pressure on domestic prices,” he says. “The S&P report also ignores environmental justice impacts on communities of color that are forced to live in proximity to these facilities.”

Last year, the Industrial Energy Consumers of America, a trade group representing energy-intensive manufacturers, campaigned via outreach to media and letters to policymakers, in favor of the pause on LNG permitting, noting that the rapid increase in LNG exports had meant skyrocketing prices and volatility that put American industrial manufacturing at a disadvantage. Paul Cicio, president and CEO of the group, told Drilled at the time that the long-term contracts U.S. LNG exporters have inked with customers in Europe and Asia “increase security for other countries and decrease security for U.S. consumers. They reduce both our economic stability and our national security.”

A report released last year from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank, declared that increased LNG exports are bad for U.S. residential energy consumers, too, connecting exports to a 9 percent increase in prices from 2016 to 2023.

​​The International Energy Agency’s 2024 World Energy Outlook issued a similar warning to the one in the DOE study, about the impact increased LNG could have on renewables. It noted that with a glut of new LNG on the market, gas consumption in the power sector could rise, particularly in Asia, at the expense of “a major slowdown in clean technology deployment and efficiency improvements.”

The DOE study could throw a legal spanner in the works for 14 LNG export facilities that are currently pending authorization. A new report from the nonprofits Friends of Earth and Public Citizen analyzed the contracts secured by these 14 facilities and found that more than half of the entities looking to buy LNG from these terminals are speculators, or what some call “portfolio purchasers” — oil majors like Saudi Aramco, Chevron, and Shell, as well as large global commodity traders Gunvor and Woodside. These entities buy up gas, then hold on to it strategically, selling to the highest bidder when the price is right, or flooding the market to depress prices strategically.

“In the bigger picture, the idea is to use this glut of LNG that’s coming online globally to open up additional markets in so-called ‘price-sensitive’ regions where companies can lock in natural gas dependency if the price gets low enough,” says Dan Wagner, research director on climate for Public Citizen. “So we're talking about 20- or 30-year contracts.”

Part of the irony here, explains Lorne Stockman, research director at Oil Change International, is that the Biden DOE already authorized a lot more capacity than is safe from both an emissions point of view and in terms of prices for domestic consumers, locking in exactly the outcomes it warns about in its study. The additional authorized capacity includes U.S. LNG export facilities in America’s neighboring countries, Mexico and Canada.

Another point of critique is the underestimation of methane emissions in the report.

The U.S. has a very complex gas supply network, made up of millions of pipelines, wells, and storage sites. Numerous analyses show that the official data underestimates U.S. oil and gas methane emissions. But the DOE study did not address this. And while the industry claims to be tackling methane leaks, Rosenbluth says documentation is scarce and opaque. “The problem is likely worse than the study concludes,” she adds.

Advocates spent four years critiquing Biden’s Department of Energy for its embrace of LNG, a fight that ultimately secured a small win in the form of its temporary pause on permitting and its commitment to study the LNG boom’s economic and environmental impact. On their way out the door, those same department staffers may have given environmental advocates a powerful tool to stop the Trump administration from doing more of the same and baking in LNG overproduction for an additional decade or more.

As they file legal challenges against Department of Energy permits for new LNG export terminals, environmental groups and public interest law firms will be able to quote from the department’s own report and cite its data to argue that these terminals do not meet the public interest requirement in the Natural Gas Act.

The Sagauro Mexico Pacific LNG export terminal, which would be built in Mexico, but falls under U.S. jurisdiction because it would be exporting U.S. gas, is a good example. Though it has secured several contracts, the terminal would be built right next to a globally significant whale nursery and would struggle to show economic benefit to the U.S.

“Under the Natural Gas Act you have to demonstrate an economic benefit to the U.S. to show that it’s in the public interest,” Zibel explains. “For the terminals in Mexico, there’s clearly no U.S. jobs benefit, and now this report is saying that excessive U.S. LNG exports will have negative economic impacts for U.S. citizens, so those are going to be much harder to justify.”