Federal judge blocks Biden’s pause on LNG export permits

A federal judge in Louisiana on Monday put the Energy Department’s pause on natural gas export permits on hold, dealing another legal blow to the Biden administration’s climate agenda.

Judge James Cain of the Western District of Louisiana, a Trump appointee, granted a request for a stay from 16 red states that had challenged the pause, arguing it will harm their economies.

The decision to stay the LNG pause upends one of Joe Biden’s major policy nods to climate-focused activists who have accused the president of not doing enough to mitigate planet-warming emissions despite Democrats passing the largest investment in climate in history via the Inflation Reduction Act .

Cain ruled that DOE failed to justify why it needed to pause approvals to review the process by which it permits projects.

“Past precedent, which the applicants relied upon, allowed the approval of the applications to proceed when updates were made,” wrote Cain, who also blocked the Biden administration’s social cost of carbon estimate in 2022 — a decision overruled by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals .

Cain also agreed with red states that DOE failed to consider their concerns about the “impact on national security, state revenues, employment opportunities, funding for schools and charities, and pollution allegedly caused by increased reliance on foreign energy sources.”

Given these factors, Cain found the states “have a likelihood of success on the merits as to the claims.”

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, one of the state attorney generals leading the challenge, called the ruling a “big win for the country’s energy industry and the millions of jobs it supports.”

“This administration’s Energy Department has no such authority to justify this ban— authority on matters like this lies with Congress and Congress alone,” Morrisey said in a statement.

Administration officials have defended the pause — which is expected to last through early next year — as necessary to ensure the approval process takes into account current market dynamics and the environmental impacts of LNG exports. They note that LNG projects that are under construction or already have permits will more than double U.S. export capacity in the coming years.

White House spokesperson Angelo Fernández Hernández said in a statement the administration is “disappointed” in the ruling.

“We remain committed to informing our decisions with the best available economic and environmental analysis, underpinned by sound science,” he said. “The United States remains the world’s largest exporter of LNG, and is currently on track to more than double existing capacity by the end of this decade.”

An Energy Department spokesperson said in a statement it “disagrees” with the court’s ruling and is evaluating next steps.

Environmental advocates said the ruling will have no immediate impact on the pending permits for LNG export projects, nor the ongoing study being conducted by DOE’s national labs to determine the economic and environmental impacts of those exports.

“While the decision requires DOE to proceed with evaluating pending LNG applications, this preliminary injunction does not order DOE to issue any specific decisions or stop the critical process of updating the data it relies on to determine whether those applications are in the public interest as required by law,” Louisa Eberle, a staff attorney at the Sierra Club, said in a statement.

Craig Segall, vice president at the environmental group Evergreen Action, said the ruling has a “paper tiger quality” to it.

“The judge basically says that you can’t have this pause, whatever it is, but DOE still has to make a public interest determination [on each project],” Segall said. “That’s just true in the law.”

Segall said the judge is “reaching pretty hard” with the ruling, which refers to the pause as an “export ban” throughout.

“DOE saying it wants to study a question sure doesn’t sound like an export ban,” Segall said. “Even with that reach, he ultimately can’t tell DOE what to find is true about science or economics.”