by James A. Bacon
An Arlington-based company that most Virginians have never heard of could well alter the global energy balance of power — if the Biden administration doesn’t get in the way.
In 2023 and 2024 alone Venture Global LNG., Inc., has announced long-term deals to supply 3 million tons of LNG to the United Kingdom (equivalent to about 5% of the U.K.’s demand), 2.25 million tons to Germany, and 1 million tons per year to Japan from its LNG facilities in Louisiana. In March the company announced that it was ordering six giant LNG vessels from shipyards in Korea to transport the hydrocarbons.
Now it appears that Venture Global, whose corporate headquarters is in Rosslyn, has struck a deal with DTEK, Ukraine’s largest private energy company, according to the Wall Street Journal. DTEK would buy up to 2 million tons yearly of LNG from a proposed export facility in Plaquemines Parish — CP2 — to resell in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. The deal would reduce dependence of the eastern European nations from Russian gas supplied through a pipeline through Ukraine, the transit agreement for which expires at the end of the year.
But a Biden moratorium on LNG exports, ordered at the behest of environmental groups, could scuttle the deal.
As the Journal writes, “you’d think the Administration would greenlight any project that helps Europe and the rest of the world break their dependence on Russian energy. Russia still accounts for about 15% of Europe’s gas supply. … If Europeans can’t get gas from the U.S. they will have to turn to Russia.”
The Biden administration says the Energy Department can approve permits to export LNG to countries with which the U.S. does not have free-trade agreements if they are in the “public interest.” Who knows. Maybe Venture Global’s CP2 facility will win DOE approval, although environmentalists who lobbied the Administration to block LNG exports in the first place will likely do everything their power to scotch this deal as well.
The environmentalists (for whom The Washington Post has functioned as a megaphone) are terrified that the exports will “lock in” carbon-dioxide emissions for decades. They may well have a point, as many European nations are experiencing the real-world impact of their infatuation with wind and solar: higher, more volatile prices for electricity, blackouts and brownouts, and the hollowing out of energy-intensive industry.
The U.S. is spending tens of billions of dollars yearly to help the Ukrainians fend off Russian invaders. A coherent foreign policy, one would think, also would support the goal of Ukrainian and European energy independence from Russia. A coherent foreign policy would acknowledge that natural gas supplied by Russia emits just as much CO2 as natural gas supplied by the U.S. A coherent foreign policy would find it desirable to promote American jobs and industry, all the more so when they don’t require massive government subsidies.
However, the CP2 facility could become the new Keystone Pipeline, a cause celebre and rallying cry for the U.S. environmental movement, so we’re likely to hear a lot more about this. However the controversy evolves, a Virginia corporation is sure to be in the center of it.