A cargo ship passes the Cheniere Energy liquefied natural gas plant in Port Arthur, Texas. (Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
When the Biden administration stopped approving licenses to export U.S. liquefied natural gas in January of last year, officials said they first needed to determine how those shipments would affect the environment and economy.
But the federal government already had some of those answers.
Just four months earlier, the Department of Energy had completed a study of the issue, concluding that ramped-up LNG exports would only modestly increase domestic residential gas prices and wouldn’t appreciably change global greenhouse gas emissions.
That assessment, which has not previously been publicly released, was reviewed by Bloomberg News. A copy of the study, dated Sept. 5, 2023, and marked as a “final review draft,” was transmitted to House Republicans examining the LNG export pause.
The analysis is likely to intensify criticisms that former President Joe Biden’s pause was politically motivated and could cast doubts on the results of a second assessment that the Energy Department released in conjunction with his export licensing moratorium in December 2024. That analysis came to different conclusions, predicting additional exports would lead to higher prices and greenhouse gas emissions.
Rep. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky who heads the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said even though Biden administration officials often claimed to “follow the science,” they abandoned that principle by keeping the draft study out of public view.
“The Biden Department of Energy withheld key data from both the American people and Congress in order to push forward their radical environmental agenda,” Comer said in a statement.
President Donald Trump lifted the pause on new LNG export licenses his first day back in the White House. He’s already approved licenses for Commonwealth LNG LLC and Venture Global LNG Inc. to export gas to countries that aren’t free-trade partners with the U.S.
But the final Biden-era LNG study still casts a shadow over Trump’s export approvals, which under federal law are meant to be granted only if they are found to be in the public interest. That final analysis provides fodder for project opponents seeking to challenge new authorizations.
That second assessment completed amid Biden’s LNG export pause is still being reviewed by the public, with a comment period due to close on March 20. Advocates of more gas exports see the conflicting studies as helping make the case for revising the assessment released last December.
Different Picture
The initial, unreleased Energy Department study offered a different picture of the role of LNG exports, providing evidence that could even be used to justify more license approvals.
For instance, where the second assessment was described as concluding that unfettered LNG exports would increase wholesale domestic natural gas prices by more than 30%, the first, unreleased analysis showed that residential prices did not exceed 4% in all modeled scenarios.
In another case, Biden’s energy secretary described the second study as showing that more LNG exports “would lead to increases in global net emissions” across every studied scenario. However, the earlier 2023 analysis that was shelved found that in multiple scenarios, global greenhouse gas emissions would decline if U.S. LNG exports climbed.
Natural gas burns more cleanly than coal. Backers of LNG exports argue that when gas displaces coal as a source of electricity, it can reduce overall planet-warming pollution.
But the final Biden-era study “bucks the displacement myth, showing that increased LNG exports do not simply replace dirtier fuel abroad,” Megan Gibson, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told reporters in a briefing March 19. Instead, she said, the analysis showed more U.S. LNG flows abroad prompt more energy consumption and, therefore, more greenhouse gas emissions too.
