Posted on 07/05/2024 12:25:20 PM PDT by JeepersFreepers
The ruling requires the administration to keep processing new applications to export LNG as the Texas-led lawsuit proceeds.
Attorney General Ken Paxton obtained a temporary injunction in his lawsuit against the Biden administration over their decision to halt liquefied natural gas exports.
Joined by 15 other state attorneys general, Paxton secured the win Monday after a federal district court judge in Western Louisiana ruled that the new administrative plan should be paused as the case proceeds.
“This ruling means [President Joe] Biden’s illegal ban does not prevent Texas natural gas from reaching market while the lawsuit continues,” stated Paxton in a Tuesday press release.
“While I continue fighting for Texans against the Biden Administration, producers can take their natural gas to market instead of flaring it,” he continued. “This will protect Texas jobs and keep our critical energy industry running.”
The Biden administration first announced their decision to temporarily pause new applications for LNG exports—excluding countries with which the U.S. has a free trade agreement—on January 26.
Federal officials justified the decision as a procedural move, arguing that they were merely updating the Department of Energy’s existing standards on economic and environmental analyses used to review LNG export applications.
However, several Texas officials interpreted the pause as a hostile affront to their state.
Among those seeing this as a hostile affront were U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham, and Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian.
What “Joe Biden did is effectively sanction the state of Texas,” contended Cruz during an episode of his “Verdict” podcast in February. “This is declaring war on Texas.”
One month later, Paxton announced that he would lead a coalition of states in a lawsuit against the administration over the move, which he argued disregards statutory mandates, disrupts the normal regulatory process, and hurts state economics.
Monday’s decision appeared to validate some of Paxton’s concerns. Judge James D. Cain Jr. specifically took issue with the administration’s framing of the LNG pause as a mere “update” to existing code and not a new order.
“It is remarkable to this Court that Defendants now argue that this matter should be appealed to the court of appeals because the NGA [Natural Gas Act] requires that an ‘Order’ be appealed to the court of appeals when they expressly stated and found that the ‘Update’ was not an Order,” wrote Cain.
Most importantly, Cain found that the administration’s primary claim—that it needed to pause approvals to review the permitting process—was not sufficiently justified.
The judge also agreed with Paxton that officials did not take seriously the potential “impact on national security, state revenues, employment opportunities, funding for schools and charities, and pollution allegedly caused by increased reliance on foreign energy sources.”
Paxton and the coalition of states seek a permanent injunction on the administrative actions and financial relief for affected states.
In addition to Texas, other states suing the administration include Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Where is Texas U.S. Sen. John Cornyn??? Probably too busy politicking to replace McConnell as senate majority leader. If the Republicans win back the senate and Cornyn becomes leader, then it will ensure an ineffective senate as usual in the next term.
Paxton continues to be one of the most aggressive and effective attorney generals in the U.S. He would make a great attorney general in the Trump administration.
John Cornyn is a RINO capitulating traitor.
This LNG export ban was only done by 0-Brand0n to punish Texas for acting to reduce illegal immigration.
An FYI.
The US has in natural gas reserves about 12.7 Trillion Cubic Meters. That includes all shale assessments.
The US produces (this includes domestic consumption + any exports) 0.95 Trillion Cubic Meters — per year.
Do the math. Do you really want to be exporting this?
In all seriousness, how quickly is natural gas created? I’m not being snarky, I just want to know how quickly the earth produces natural gas and compare it to how quickly we consume it.
yep and for being a pesky F U to the feds.
What Biden did is pretend to do something to pacify the enviro wackos raising hell in his Oval office.
By the way. There are now tens of thousands of envirowackos that have jobs to be abolished as a result of the loss of the Chevron decision and the EPA ability to regulate all their nonsense.
You make a good point. We should be conserving our clean burning natural gas and using coal and nuclear to generate electricity. Natural gas should be used for homes and businesses. Also, it is a feedstock for many chemicals, textiles and engineering plastics. I worked in a plant using natural gas as a feedstock producing many products including a high grade engineering plastic.
Legit question.
In a general sense, it does get created. The issue is that it escapes. You find it in certain kinds of rock. Similar to looking for oil.
The issue is not that it is created. It’s created slowly, as you clearly noted you understand. The issue is failure to trap. Over the millions of years, it escapes to the surface and dissociates.
There are many ppl who think oil and gas are replenishing all the time and have no concerns about inevitable scarcity. But those same ppl seem somewhat reluctant to pay anyone for wells that were pumped out and are empty. Their confidence in replenishing doesn’t seem to go very far.
Will more be found? Yes. The current surge is from shale. Shale was known to have oil for decades. It was not technology that freed it. It was 0% interest rates starting about 2010. Loans for drilling had no cost.
But now . . . it’s going empty. The BOOM was indeed a boom, in employment. The land looks like a pin cushion and with oil and gas are running out. That becomes the true inevitablity. Geology doesn’t care about interest rates, or politics. If it has gone empty, it has gone empty at 10% rates or at 0% rates. And empty whether it is Biden or Trump in charge.
I say "a couple of decades" based on stories of abandoned coal mines around here building up methane in areas that were sealed off. This article is about exporting LNG. A related topic, as far as your post of depleting NG goes, is that Alabama Power and other power companies were forced by Obama to close down some coal plants and replace them with power fueled by "clean burning natural gas". Thus some states use more natural gas than before.
Better look again. We have about 650 Trillion Cubic Feet in reserves. Go to eia.gov.
Negative. If only it was that easy…
This number doesn't meet what I've been seeing.
U.S. natural gas proved reserves have increased nearly every year since 2000. Major advances in natural gas exploration and production technologies, such as horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing in shale, sandstone, carbonate, and other tight geologic formations, contributed to increases in natural gas production and reserves.
According to U.S. Crude Oil and Natural Gas Proved Reserves, Year-end 2021, as of December 30, 2021, U.S. total natural gas proved reserves—estimated as wet gas (which includes hydrocarbon gas liquids [HGLs])—totaled about 625.4 trillion cubic feet (Tcf). This volume was a 32% increase from the estimated 473 Tcf of proved reserves at end of 2020. The dry natural gas portion of these reserves (after removal of HGLs) is about 589 Tcf, a 32% increase from the 445 Tcf of dry gas reserves in 2020. Source
While proven reserve totals have been climbing rapidly, your point is well taken that the totals are finite. Instead of exporting natural gas for cash flow we should be using it to make concrete for nuclear reactors.
We have 100 year worth of natural gas reserves at least. Probably more.
Our bigger threat is the collapse of our birth rate. Elon Musk is talking a lot about it now. Pat Buchanan wrote a book on this topic a couple decades ago...
The Carrie person above understood.
Quoting in Cubic Feet always exaggerates and reassures. But the world uses cubic meters.
As I have noted about 80 times here, for 70 years each year BP has published a World Statistical Report for every country of the world. It is in the form of a large spreadsheet and ANYONE with any even casual interest in this sort of thing should go download it, and do it every 20th of June.
https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review/resources-and-data-downloads
This is BP’s outsourcing. Download the .xlsx spreadsheet file. Open Office will open it . . . slooooowly. It will look frozen, just go do something else and come back to it.
The global gas reserves are under review, but as of 2020 they quoted at 12.6 trillion cubic meters, as I said. The gas production is not under review and it quoted for 2023 at 1.035 trillion cubic meters. That’s quoted in Billion Cubic Meters of 1035.
Total world production about 4 trillion cubic meters/yr.
Total world reserves (under review) 188 Trillion cubic meters.
It ain’t in the US.
Gas is usually not a target for drilling. Wet gas may be, or a byproduct of oil drilling.
Gas is what happens when oil’s long hyrdocarbon chains dissociate down to CH4. The deeper you go, the less likely the hydrocarbons found are going to be oil — because it is so hot. The heat breaks the chains down.
It sounds like some of it that can’t be sold is being burnt off anyway. Might as well sell it.
That does happen, but it’s not all that easy.
Here is the scenario. First, consider a shale oil well. It will flow about 800 barrels/day on day 1, then lose 60% by day 365. Then another 40% at 2 yrs and another 30% by year 3 and so on. They die very quickly.
They are gassy. Lots of gas flowing with the oil.
But the oil can be hauled by truck, and often is, to a train depot. You can’t haul gas by truck. You have to build a pipeline, or you just flare it off.
The pipeline may have to go 10s of miles. It will take maybe years to get the pipeline done to a gathering point. And by then the well is dead and ready for P&A (Plug and Abandon).
Nobody flares because they want to flare. They flare because they have to flare. By the time a pipeline is ready, the oil is done. So why not wait until the pipeline is done before hauling oil? Because the loan nowadays is creating interest expense.
When you’re burning 100.4 million barrels of oil per day (as the world is), you don’t have to run out for there to be a starvation apocalypse.
You just have to run short.
One can haul it as LNG, but it ain't cheap. Getting it into the truck as LNG onsite is the barrier.
I do wonder about the opportunity in improving small liquifaction technology to make local LNG storage for accumulation and shipment more practical. What is the barrier to piping it off a well into the local natural gas distribution system? I know they have to filter it and add the scent and so on, but is it really that hard or is it a regulatory barrier? Or do they have to fraction off the heavier gases (such as propane and butane) so that it burns safely in home appliances? Those condensation pressures aren't so high that more portable means cannot be devised (a fractioning plant on a truck so to speak). My guess is that electrical generating plants aren't so picky or could be made to be so flexible, and those could be more portable to hook into the local distribution line grid (parking a portable gas generated electrical power plant next to the well). Is this more a paperwork problem than a technical issue?
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