Federal judge blocks Biden’s ban on LNG exports

A federal judge on Monday blocked President Joe Biden’s ban on liquified natural gas export permits.

The case, filed by Alaska’s attorney general and 15 other states in March, was decided when U.S. District Judge James Cain of Louisiana ruled that Biden’s LNG ban “be stayed in its entirety, effective immediately.”

In January, the Biden Energy department halted all new approvals of LNG export permits to non-free-trade agreement countries, jeopardizing the production, storage, and transportation of natural gas, which would cost thousands of jobs and hurt the economies of numerous states. The decision ignored the congressionally approved Natural Gas Act and broke from decades of agency policy.

The attorneys general argued that the LNG export ban has already and will continue to decrease investment in the natural gas industry and infrastructure, leading to decreased production and loss of specific tax revenues for the states that are the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Biden.

Daniel Turner, founder and executive director for Power The Future, said, “Joe Biden seems to have as much trouble following the law as he does putting together a sentence without a teleprompter. This ban on American energy from Joe Biden not only hurt our energy workers but gave Vladimir Putin an opportunity to expand the market for Russia’s natural gas. This was another election year failure from Joe Biden trying to appease his extreme climate base no matter how much it hurts American families.”

Attorney General Treg Taylor joined his contemporaries from Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming in the lawsuit led by Louisiana.

Biden Administration acted “completely without reason or logic,” wrote Judge Cain, who said the states are likely to succeed in showing that the ban was arbitrary, capricious, and unconstitutional.

As with other actions by the Biden Administration, the Energy Department’s decisions were “above and beyond its scope of authority.” Cain said he reviewed the voluminous studies attached as exhibits, “all of which boast of both the economic and environmental benefits of exporting natural gas” and that the department failed to justify why it needed to pause the approval of permits.

“Past precedent, which the applicants relied upon, allowed the approval of the applications to proceed when updates were made,” Cain said, adding that there is a legitimate concern about. the impact on national security, state revenues, employment, funding for schools and charities, and increased pollution from foreign energy development.

The ban did not apply to Alaska because the LNG project already has its permits.