With Cameron Parish’s population and tax revenue plummeting, the Biden administration derailed a long-awaited natural-gas plant.
It was the duck hunting that brought Scott Lavergne and his wife back to Cameron Parish, La., a couple of decades ago, but it’s the people who have kept him there.
“You have a sense of family,” he said of his neighbors, who take care of one another in this rural community on Louisiana’s southwest coast. “I love being here.”
But the number of people who call Cameron Parish home has plummeted over the last two decades, due largely to four hurricanes that walloped the region; Hurricane Rita in 2005, Hurricane Ike with its 22-foot storm surge in 2008, and then the one-two punch of hurricanes Laura and Delta in 2020.
Only about 4,700 people remain in the parish today, half the number from before Rita.
The diminishing population has led to a significant falling off of tax revenues, and fewer opportunities to invest in infrastructure — roads, water systems — or to increase the pay of critical employees, like teachers, said Lavergne, the parish’s property assessor.
That’s why Lavergne wants Cameron Parish to continue as a leader in the nation’s emerging liquid-natural-gas, or LNG, export sector. In addition to creating hundreds of high-paying jobs, LNG plants — massive facilities, which process natural gas, supercool it, and store it as liquid before it is shipped overseas — also pay a lot of taxes, which greatly improve the parish’s bottom line.
Virginia-based LNG firm, Venture Global, already has a facility in Cameron Parish; its Calcasieu Pass plant opened a few years back. But an even bigger facility planned for nearby, known as CP2, was among the handful of projects stalled by President Joe Biden’s decision in January to pause the permitting of new LNG export terminals and shipments while the administration studies their potential environmental impacts.
The U.S. is now the world leader in exporting LNG, which is cleaner than burning coal. The $10 billion CP2 project alone is expected to increase daily shipments from the U.S. by 20 percent. But environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, claim that CP2 is a “carbon bomb” that will turn the coast into an industrial wasteland and hurt local fishermen.
Lavergne doesn’t buy the alarmism, saying local opposition to CP2 is “very minute.” He called Biden’s decision to pause CP2 and other LNG projects nearby “a heartbreaker.” But he’s optimistic those LNG export projects will be among the first energy projects green-lighted when President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House in January.
Despite Biden’s pause, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved a key construction permit for CP2 over the summer, though the project still needs a Department of Energy permit to ship LNG overseas to countries without free-trade agreements.
“As soon as he gets in office, I’m sure that he’ll sign the last permit they need,” Lavergne said. “They’re already starting to do pipeline prep as we speak.”
During his first term, Trump was a champion of the nation’s energy revolution. As a candidate over the last year, he promised to “drill, drill, drill” on Day One and vowed to slash red-tape, and fast-track new oil pipelines, refineries, and power plants.
“I will cut your energy prices in half within twelve months,” he told a crowd in Detroit in October.
That may be a stretch. American oil and gas production is already at record levels despite the Biden administration’s inconsistent energy policies and efforts to stymie oil and gas production, energy experts who spoke with National Review said. Trump’s ability to greatly impact gas and energy prices in the short-term will likely be limited.
But Trump does have another opportunity to establish policies that will set the country up for long-term, generational energy dominance, experts said. Trump’s transition team is in the process of assembling a wide-ranging energy package to roll out in the days after his inauguration, which would include approving the LNG export permits, Reuters reported.
“There’s a big difference between campaign political rhetoric and energy-price-policy reality,” said Frank Maisano with Bracewell, a law firm that represents energy-sector clients. “I know what his goal is, to have energy dominance. His goal is to provide a stable price. His goal is to meet consumers’ demand with affordable, reliable energy.”
Green-lighting the paused LNG export facilities and shipments is the “most prominent example of how we can get things going fast,” he added.
Trump’s selection of fracking-firm CEO Chris Wright as his secretary of energy and North Dakota governor Doug Burgum for secretary of the interior was a strong start, said Maisano, who called the two nominees “substantive policy and energy market experts.”
“They know more about energy markets than probably most energy secretaries that we’ve ever had,” he said. “You have two guys who have a complete and fundamental understanding of how the market operates and what our energy realities are.”
Maisano said Trump has an opportunity to bring consistency back to an energy sector that greatly needs it. Biden, he said, whipsawed the industry by “jumping back and forth between his activist climate friends and the political reality of high inflation and gas prices demanding more production.”
In addition to pausing LNG export projects, the Biden administration took hundreds of actions to hamper oil and gas production as part its fight against climate change. Among them: The administration greatly limited federal lands open for oil exploration and hiked royalties, imposed new taxes on oil companies, and imposed the strictest-ever emissions standards in an effort to speed up the electric-vehicle transition.
Biden set the tone for his administration on his first day in office by blocking oil and gas exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and cancelling the Keystone XL pipeline. The nearly 2,000-mile Keystone project would have pumped 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta, Canada, over the border to U.S. refineries, and it, too, would have been a financial boon to many small communities in its path.
Trump is aiming to revive the pipeline when he returns to office, in part to back up the pro-oil message he campaigned on, Politico reported. But it’s unclear if that project will ever come back online, even with Trump’s full backing.
The former owner of the project, Canada’s TC Energy, officially ended the project in the summer of 2021, dug up the pipeline it had installed, and then a few months back spun off its liquid pipelines business to a new firm, South Bow. In an email to National Review, a South Bow spokeswoman was noncommittal about resuming Keystone XL.
“South Bow supports efforts to transport more Canadian crude oil to meet U.S. demand,” she said, adding that their “long-term strategy is to safely and efficiently grow our business.”
Leaders in McCone County, Mont., one of the communities that expected to benefit from Keystone XL, told National Review they’ve heard nothing about restarting it.
“There hasn’t been any talk of it,” McCone County commissioner Lonny Jensen said.
“When they pulled out, it was my understanding that it was a dead project,” said Garry Johnson, the mayor of Circle, Mont., which is in McCone County. “It would have been a big shot in the arm, that’s for sure. It was a big disappointment that Biden killed that. He didn’t win any votes doing that.”
Alex Stevens, a policy analyst with the Institute for Energy Research, said he doesn’t expect any private company to take on a reauthorized Keystone XL project, construction of which would almost surely extend beyond Trump’s term.
“They already saw the project killed once because of politics,” he said.
Maisano said Keystone XL became a “symbol” of environmental opposition and a political “lightning rod.” In the big picture, he said, the LNG export projects are much more important to the nation’s energy goals and are more strategically important to American allies in Europe seeking to break their dependence on Russian energy.
“If you look at what’s going on in Ukraine, if you look at our competition with China and how we can help our allies, and how this helps us domestically protect ourselves from a global energy market, [LNG export projects are] definitely in the national interest,” he said.
In addition to giving the go-ahead to the LNG projects, Stevens expects Trump to make opening more federal land for exploration a priority.
“That’s going to be a big signal that, okay, we’re focused again on making sure that we can produce short-term, long-term,” he said. “The falloff in production on federal lands and the ability for people to step in there and produce was just absolutely killed under Biden.”
After Trump’s win on Election Day, the American Petroleum Institute published a policy roadmap for his administration. The country, it said, has a “generational opportunity to fully leverage U.S. energy leadership to improve the lives of all Americans and to bring stability to a volatile world.”
In addition to lifting the LNG permitting pause and better leveraging the nation’s onshore and offshore energy resources, the road map also prioritizes permitting reform.
“That’s important to our industry, but it’s also important to a lot of other industries who put steel in the ground and build things,” said Dustin Meyer, API’s senior vice president of policy. “We’re moving into a chapter of American history in which we have to have the ability to build big things, but right now we can’t because our permitting process is so fundamentally broken.”
The permitting “gauntlet” pipeline developers have to run through “is simply unworkable,” he added.
Stevens said permitting reform will likely be a priority for Elon Musk’s and Vivek Ramaswamy’s new Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
“Everything I’ve heard is that energy and permitting and just being able to build anything in this country is going to be a focus of that,” he said.
Protecting consumer choice by rolling back fuel-efficiency standards and regulations aimed at internal-combustion-engine vehicles is another part of the API roadmap. Meyer said they’re pushing the new Trump administration to be “technology neutral.”
“The Biden administration put forward multiple regulations that were designed, in our opinion, to be a de facto ban on the internal combustion engine. We thought that was fundamentally misguided and limits consumer choice,” Meyer said. “We think that EVs are a great option for a lot of American families, but they don’t work for everybody. And American consumers should have more choice, not less.”
In addition to his vow to “drill, drill, drill,” Trump as a candidate also promised to terminate Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and “make sure that [offshore wind] ends on Day 1.”
Stevens said Trump’s administration will likely try to “claw back” money targeted to offshore wind projects in the IRA. “I think the initial starting point of that is going to be, say, cut all of it and probably negotiate somewhere in the middle,” he said.
API and Maisano support of an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, which would include alternative energy. Trump’s energy picks seem to share that view, Maisano said.
“Offshore win is a viable thing for places where it will work, and it needs to be part of the energy mix,” Maisano said. “Anything that short-circuits that is probably short-sighted.”
Meyer agreed: “This is an area in which we think Americans should have more choices, not less. And I think that extends to the sorts of energy technologies that are part of our energy future.”