LNG Exports Are Illegal
As the White House, Congressional leadership and energy regulators at FERC are fast-tracking natural gas exports, they’re forgetting one important fact: it’s against the law. First, a little background. Less than a decade ago, natural gas prices were at record highs and folks like then-Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan were saying that the US had to make it easier to permit Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) imports. Fast forward to today, where fracking has resulted in booming domestic natural gas production, fueling calls to make it easier to permit LNG exports. But fracking poses enormous risks to the environment, nullifying emissions benefits when it is burned as a fuel. We’ve raised these concerns about LNG exports in the past, but new research shows that exporting LNG is illegal.
In 1975, President Ford signed the Energy Policy & Conservation Act into law. In order to protect consumers, Section 103(b)(1) of the EPCA (S.622) directed the President of the United States “to promulgate a rule prohibiting the export of crude oil and natural gas produced in the United States, except that the President may…exempt from such prohibition such crude oil or natural gas exports which he [sic] determines to be consistent with the national interest.” While the Department of Commerce promulgated rules banning crude oil exports, the agency never got around to writing rules banning natural gas exports. This oversight not only means that proposed LNG exports are most likely illegal, but that consumers are at risk. That’s because of supply and demand: the more fracked natural gas we export, domestic supplies will get tighter, pushing up gas prices for households and businesses.
Public Citizen will ask the Department of Commerce to issue this long-dormant requirement to ban natural gas exports (stopgasexports.org)not just to protect consumers, but to discourage the additional fracking that would occur to meet expanded demand wrought by LNG exports.
Tyson Slocum is Director of Public Citizen’s Energy Program. Follow him on Twitter @TysonSlocum
June 22, 2014 @ 11:18 pm
Though there seems to be plenty now, oil and gas resources are finite. So is anyone looking out for the future? Do we allow the big corporations to sell our resources abroad for their profit, only to face much higher prices ourselves in the future? You DO know what finite means, do you not?
June 23, 2014 @ 11:47 am
The inanity of squeezing the ‘last drop’ of lazily converted energy from the crust of our Mother is the immature adolescent impulse we’ll be recompensing until the quality of civilization devolves us to the ‘hunter-gatherer’ existence! Everything possible must be done to prevent this human ‘self-destruction’!
June 24, 2014 @ 12:29 pm
While the oil companies are in a rush to tell us that these exports will be a boon for America, they forget that the expense of repairing the damage to our planet (if possible, otherwise the cost of setting up civilization on Mars after we destroy the earth) will far outweigh ANY short term gains we might see (by we, I mean the 1% of course.) i’d like someone to seriously calculate the cost of the damage we do to the planet with each new fracking site opened. Has this ever been put into dollars and cenrs?
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January 5, 2015 @ 5:03 pm
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