longread
Texas' Gulf Coast Communities Are Fighting Against Big Oil and Gashttps://www.texasobserver.org/the-export-boom/In the next few years, the city is poised to become one of the nation’s largest liquified natural gas (LNG) export hubs, piping in natural gas from the Permian Basin in West Texas, chilling it to subzero temperatures, and loading the gas, now in liquid state, onto tankers headed for Europe and Asia, where it will be burned in power plants. Exxon Mobil’s Golden Pass facility is under construction, and Sempra Energy is planning to move forward with its facility just up the river. When they’re both up and running, the plants will have a combined export capacity of nearly 30 million tons of LNG per year.
Port Arthur isn’t alone. All along the nearly 400-mile stretch of Texas’ Gulf Coast, nearly a dozen oil and gas export terminals are slated to come online within the next decade. The Gulf Coast as a whole has long been a major energy hub, with nearly half of the nation’s existing oil and gas refining capacity already here. For decades, the facilities built here were import-oriented: The United States was consuming far more energy than the nation could produce. That began to change in 2008, when a revolution in fracking freed up millions of barrels of oil and gas trapped in shale formations in Texas, Pennsylvania, and North Dakota. Then, in 2015, Congress repealed a decades-old ban on crude oil exports, opening the floodgates of American oil and gas to the rest of the world.
In towns like Port Arthur, coastal residents are fighting against the new wave of oil and gas export plants: challenging permits, staging protests at home or joining forces with activists abroad, and calling for an outright ban on all fossil fuel exports. Farther down the coast, communities are rallying to stop industry from entering their area altogether. In Brownsville, local opposition to two LNG export plants started when the proposals were first submitted for review seven years ago.
By 2024, Texas’ LNG production capacity is on track to quadruple, from 30 million tons a year to nearly 120 million tons per year. Almost all of the United States’ oil exports already leave from the Gulf Coast, where pipelines and refineries crisscross the landscape.
...
But the terminals will irrevocably change the coast’s ecology. Acres of sensitive wetlands, marshes, and prairies that provide safe shelter for millions of migratory birds and sea turtles will be disrupted or destroyed. Naturally shallow bays and inlets will be dredged to make room for some of the largest shipping containers in the world, burying oyster reefs and fisheries. The communities who live closest to the plants will breathe dirtier air as the plants emit thousands of pounds of toxic chemicals like benzene, volatile organic compounds, and carbon monoxide. When the exported oil or gas is burned for power halfway around the world, it will release vast amounts of greenhouse gases, which fuel climate change. The already vulnerable Texas coast will be even more prone to deadly heat waves, strong storms, and long droughts.
“Communities on the Gulf Coast are already hit hard by climate disasters,” says Ethan Buckner, an organizer with the environmental watchdog group Earthworks. “They are impacted by the acute increase of emissions and pollution, and now they are being asked to take on the burden of new pipelines, storage terminals, processing plants, and dredging projects—it’s sacrificing the communities and the climate.”