Several Gulf Coast LNG and utility executives dismissed the importance of sustainability for LNG projects at the Reuters Energy LIVE 2025 conference in Houston, Texas, last week.
“So, at the end of the day, all the sustainability stuff, I’m not going to belittle it too much,” Vivek Chandra, CEO of Gulfstream LNG told attendees. “I’ll belittle it a little bit, let’s be clear.”
“That cleaner LNG phase that was there a couple years ago, ‘let’s plant a few trees and call that an offset,’ that was all bullshit,” Chandra said. “We know it and everybody knows it. And I think we look bad for it, at the end of the day.”
“Now obviously if we can somehow integrate carbon storage and get some tax credit from the U.S. government, why wouldn’t we?” Chandra continued.
Chandra’s Gulfstream is advancing a project in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, just south of New Orleans that would export roughly 4 million tons per year of liquefied natural gas. While Chandra mocked sustainability, it has real impacts for the people who live near these gas terminals, which emit enormous amounts of pollution.
“The Gulfstream LNG project is another heavy weight on an already strained Gulf coast,” Roishetta Sibley Ozane, the founder of the Vessel Project of Louisiana, told DeSmog. “Our area has endured enough environmental stress, and the idea of introducing more potential pollution is deeply concerning. The coast, with its fragile ecosystems, is already suffering from the impacts of industrialization and climate change.”
Those problems are no mere abstractions for Ozane, who lost her southwest Louisiana home in 2020, following back-to-back hurricanes. She responded by founding the Vessel Project, a mutual aid organization that aims to help people with their basic needs following catastrophe.
“Bringing in a project like this will not only further pollute our air and water quality but also highlights a broader issue of environmental injustice. Our community, predominantly black and low income, bears the brunt of these developments, facing health risks and diminished quality of life,” she told DeSmog. “It’s frustrating to think about how decisions made far away can affect our local environment and well-being.”
LNG export proposals are booming, fueled by the Trump administration’s push to speed up approvals for new export terminals.
Chandra’s Gulfstream LNG alone has the potential to emit 1.45 million tons per year of greenhouse gases, according to a recent report from the Environmental Integrity Project — as much as driving your average gasoline-fueled passenger car for roughly 3.7 billion miles, based on federal equivalencies. Plus there’s the hazardous air pollutants and other airborne emissions.
Gulfstream LNG wasn’t the only company to offer its views on sustainability at the conference during a panel called Accelerating LNG Growth Across the Americas.
“Our fundamental planning principles are affordability, reliability, and then sustainability —and there’s a reason that’s the order, right?” Eliecer Viamontes, CEO of Entergy Texas, said.
Entergy Texas, part of utility giant Entergy, provides electrical power to over a half-million customers in what Viamontes described as “one of the largest industrial corridors in the world.” The company’s territory includes Port Arthur, where Sempra and ConocoPhillips are currently building a major LNG project, and parent company Entergy recently struck deals to power data centers for both Meta and Google, Viamontes noted.
“That’s why a lot of our portfolio is around natural gas power plants,” Viamontes added, after describing his company’s priorities.
Anne Rolfes, director of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which opposes the LNG build-out, pushed back on that idea. “We get more data all the time that exporting gas raises home energy costs,” she told DeSmog.
Jonathan Bass, CEO of a second LNG developer, Argent LNG, based in Port Fourchon, Louisiana, also weighed in on sustainability later in the session, borrowing Viamontes’ framing while adding his own twist.
“Yes, affordability is key. Reliability is probably second,” Bass told the crowd. “And I think sustainability is a far third if you’re not hitting the first two.”
‘Trump Clock’ Is Ticking
With the Trump administration aggressively pushing LNG projects forward, LNG companies have a lot to celebrate this year — but a whole new range of problems.
“This is a good time to get the permits, a lot of people have said,” Chandra said, referring to the Trump administration’s drive to loosen LNG permitting regulations. Over the past year, President Trump has greased the skids for LNG exporters, beginning with executive orders promoting the industry and continuing through to his efforts to force Europeans to agree to buy more U.S. LNG and nuclear technology.
However, for LNG projects to make a profit with today’s high U.S. natural gas prices and lower prices for LNG in Europe and Asia, Chandra warned that companies need to keep their spending budgets tight. If developers try to move too fast, he said, “you’ll end up with a project that has massive cost overruns and someone’s going to be left holding the bag.”
LNG developers spent 2025 in a sprint to nab federal permits while the Trump administration remains in power. “So I think that’s the Trump clock. And it ticks down, tick tick tick tick tick tick,” Argent’s Bass said. “So you’ve just got to get through this process as quick as you can.”
Argent LNG, a relative late-comer to the LNG spree, has been speeding its proposed 25 million tons-per-year LNG export terminal through its federal permitting process, with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) accepting the company’s pre-filing, the company announced this fall. If built, Argent’s Port Fourchon, Louisiana, terminal would become one of the largest export terminals in North America.
Another warning sign for LNG developers: Analysts foresee a serious glut of U.S. LNG export capacity forming. Already this year, Bass noted at the conference, many of his competitors have reached their final investment decision (FID), moving forward with projects capable of exporting 77 million tons per year of LNG.
But that final investment decision isn’t the final hurdle for an LNG project — and not every project that hits that milestone will ultimately be built, Bass predicted. “I don’t see those 77 million tons getting financed and shovels in the ground and going forward,” Bass said.
On the consumer side, already, the surge in LNG exports has begun driving Americans’ utility bills sharply higher, a December 16 report by Public Citizen found. Higher natural gas prices added $124 to the average U.S. family’s utility bill totals from January through September, Public Citizen found.
The report finds record LNG exports were the primary factor driving utility bills higher, with demand from gas-fired power for data centers also contributing — and both booms may only be getting started.
One out of every six American households are now behind on their utility bills, Public Citizen noted.
“Household energy costs have climbed three times faster than overall inflation under the Trump administration, sending the costs of heating and powering a home through the roof,” Sen. Edward Markey (D–Mass.) said in a press statement that accompanied the report. “Record-breaking levels of natural gas exports are breaking the bank on your monthly energy bill.”
Gulfstream’s Goals for Government
Gulfstream might be on the smaller side for an LNG project, with its 2023 export authorization paper work showing the company sought approval to ship up a little over 230 billion cubic feet of natural gas per year.
But even a small LNG project is a giant. The entire Canadian province of Quebec, for example, consumed just 215 billion cubic feet of natural gas that year, to give a sense for the scale of the company’s ambitions — and potential impact.
Chandra repeatedly expressed gratitude to the Trump administration for speeding along the permit process — but he also had criticisms, including about Trump’s tariffs, which he termed “the dirty ‘T’ word.”
“I think that — to me, the government should be here to give us permits, which it does, and then after that I’d rather not have any politicization of LNG,” Chandra said. “I know a lot of people here have said, oh, U.S. politicization is good, you know, force customers to buy our gas,” he said. “I think that’s — how can I say it — it’s a sugar high. It doesn’t help us in the long run.”
“In the end, it’s a double-edged sword,” he added. “China now can’t buy our gas at all because of U.S. government involvement.”
The Gulfstream LNG leader also called for an end to lawsuits challenging permits, often filed by public interest groups and environmental watchdogs.
“Once we get the permit, the permit should be secure,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any legal challenges after that.”
Rolfes with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, said project opponents aren’t going anywhere. “Executives should not fool themselves into thinking the permit is the last word,” she told DeSmog. “On the contrary, when the permit is issued — as it always in this broken, rubber-stamping system — the battle has just begun.”
That’s in part because the impacts from the ongoing LNG construction boom are already upending lives on the Gulf Coast — fueling local opposition, particularly from people who make their living from fishing and shrimping.
“In so many words, they are just pushing us out – bullying us,” Sky Leger, a Cameron Louisiana shrimper told the Environmental Integrity Project in an October report detailing the LNG industry’s history of failing to comply with pollution laws. “The end result is going to be the complete elimination of commercial fishing in Cameron, Louisiana. Up until about six or seven years ago, shrimping was the main industry here. But they just came in here and completely destroyed it.”
Both Gulfstream and Argent are aiming to begin exports in 2030, meaning neither project will be ready to roll until after the 2028 presidential election. That’s causing jitters for LNG exporters and their financiers and backers about how vulnerable today’s permits might prove to be to shifting political winds.
“Environmental justice was all they cared about,” Chandra said of the Biden administration, describing how another project he’d been involved with, Texas LNG, “suffered two years of permitting” difficulties. “And now in the new permit regime, they said, don’t even mention it. Don’t even put it anywhere in your reports.”
“Okay, I’m happy to comply to whatever the rules are,” he said. “But I want to make sure that the rules of the game don’t change two years from now and then they come back and say, ‘hey, you didn’t put in environmental justice.’”
For the people most impacted by LNG developers’ plans, however, the need for environmental justice runs far deeper than simply a checkbox to tick on the paperwork submitted to regulators.
“We deserve a future that prioritizes sustainability and equity, not one that continues to prioritize profit over people and nature,” Ozane told DeSmog. “The voices of those impacted need to be heard. Enough is enough.”
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