On the 16th of February, Texas and West Louisiana residents threatened by LNG projects and pipelines showed up at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). FERC is infamous as the oil and gas industry’s rubber stamp, and is now planning to allow Freeport LNG to restart their Texas LNG export facility that exploded less than a year ago in June 2022.

Freeport residents found out about the proposed LNG plant restart when FERC gave them one week’s notice of a hearing to “consider” Freeport LNG’s application for “phase 1” restart. This sort of hearing is almost always a circus and a scam. Residents are allowed to vent for a minute or two after hearing usually an hour or two of propaganda for the project, and these hearings are almost always after a decision to approve the project has been made. This fake hearing model is used throughout the US, at the Federal, state, and local level for almost all major projects

Beyond Extreme Energy (BXE) has been hosting these “Frontlines to FERC” events cooinciding with FERC’s monthly board meetings. With three new US LNG export plants now in the pipeline so to speak plus the Freeport situation, FERC is likely to soon get more of the sort of attention they got from pro-Earth and community defense advocates they got from about 2012 though 2016. The three new proposed LNG export plants are Sempra Energy’s Port Arthur plant in Texas, Energy Transfer LP’s Lake Charles in Louisiana and NextDecade Corp’s Rio Grande in Texas.