On Thursday, enormous American flags adorned the towering construction project in Port Sulphur, La. 

Port Sulphur sits about 20 miles south of New Orleans near the end of Plaquemines Parish, which sits on a narrow peninsula in the Gulf of Mexico – or Gulf of America, if you prefer – and is solid Trump country, with 68% of its voters casting ballots for President Donald Trump. 

The flags signaled support for the president’s newly announced policy to establish American “energy dominance” worldwide. 

Gov. Jeff Landry, who ran for office pledging to “unleash Louisiana’s oil and gas production,” arrived at Venture Global’s vast and expanding liquified natural gas (LNG) export facility in Port Sulphur alongside Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright. The two federal officials lead the National Energy Dominance Council, formed through a Trump executive order last month, to spur U.S. oil and gas production and reverse the checks on fossil fuels that President Joe Biden had overseen during his time in office.

“The prior administration had a full-on attack against U.S. energy,” Burgum told a crowd of workers at the Plaquemines LNG facility, whom he lauded, saying there’s “nothing more patriotic than American workers that are working to build energy dominance.”

Wright echoed that point. “You are bringing America back,” he said, noting that Louisiana exports more LNG than any other state. “This is number one.”

The visit was a “stunt,” with officials focused more on investors than the workers they praised, said Tyson Slocum, director of the energy program at Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization. 

“Secretaries Wright and Burgum’s stunt just shows that their allegiance will always be with the oil and gas industry instead of the American people,” Slocum said.

Supersizing Plaquemines LNG

The officials had traveled to Port Sulphur to help Venture Global CEO Mike Sabel announce an $18 billion third-phase expansion, which would supersize the terminal into the largest LNG export facility in the country.

The Plaquemines LNG export facility was approved by President Trump in 2019 and began shipping cargo in late December. The second phase of construction is expected to be completed by September 2025. 

Built along the Mississippi River on a 632-acre site, big enough to swallow nearly 500 football fields, the Plaquemines LNG site is so large that its employees must take buses across it. The three-phase project, which Burgum called “the biggest construction project in North America,” has, within its first two phases, already depleted local water supplies. Whenever its workforce leaves a shift, traffic becomes so dense that one minister stopped conducting funerals on weekdays. During hurricane season, the additional traffic on the peninsula’s one highway clogs evacuation routes and hinders emergency response.

Here, in Port Sulphur, a campus of equipment freezes natural gas down to -260 degrees Fahrenheit, creating a liquified form that vessels can carry to overseas markets in special cooling tanks. To freeze the gas to those temperatures, the engines produce a large amount of carbon-dioxide exhaust that the company plans to inject underground, through a still-questionable technology called Carbon Capture and Sequestration. 

The third phase of the Plaquemines facility is not yet an actuality. A final investment decision on the next phase will come after the company produces LNG at a different Venture Global export facility in southwest Louisiana, near Lake Charles.

As proposed, the 1,150-acre CP2 facility will sit adjacent to the company’s existing, 432-acre Calcasieu Pass (CP1) facility. Last year, the Biden administration delayed issuing an export authorization to CP2 and others, to determine the growing industry’s climate effects.

But last week, Burgum assured the rapt crowd that the U.S. Department of the Interior would lead America to energy dominance by giving unfettered access to the country’s natural resources, cutting red tape and “getting the federal government off the back of the worker, off the back of companies.”

Since January, the president has made several key changes, to reverse Biden-era regulations and litigation in ways that directly affect Louisiana communities.

On the first day of Trump’s presidency, the U.S. Department of Energy reversed the LNG pause on approvals for pending export applications, adopted by the Biden Administration as a check on rapid LNG expansion that would have allowed the department to update climate and economic analyses used to determine whether such authorizations are in the public interest. Without that pause, Louisiana’s CP2 plant will likely move more swiftly into the construction phase, after state officials give their expected nod to its air-permit applications.

In February, the Trump administration greenlit the first export approval for another, smaller, LNG plant proposed for Cameron Parish. Commonwealth LNG plans to build an additional export terminal on 150 acres along the right side of the Calcasieu Ship Channel, just across from Venture Global’s operating CP1 facility. 

And on Mardi Gras, days before last week’s visit to Port Sulphur, the Trump administration announced plans to drop a federal lawsuit against Denka, a Japanese company that runs the Denka Performance Elastomer plant, where the Environmental Protection Agency had measured high levels of chloroprene, a toxic chemical and likely carcinogen. Those toxins were released into the predominantly Black community of LaPlace, La., the lawsuit alleged.

The new administration also canceled a 1994 environmental justice directive requiring federal agencies to analyze environmental and public health hazards in minority or low-income communities and to avoid adding to them.

Outstanding Permit Violations at Calcasieu Pass

For CP2, Venture Global applied for construction and operating air permits that would allow the annual release of more than 8.5 million tons of greenhouse gases and nearly 750,000 pounds of toxic air pollutants, on top of existing emissions from the operating CP1 facility. 

That much toxicity will increase already-high levels of local illness and further destroy the area’s fish and seafood industry, community activists say. 

“LNG export facilities in our state have already sickened our children, caused water shortages, increased pollution and destroyed critical wetlands,” said Roishetta Ozane, founder of the Vessel Project of Louisiana, an environmental justice and mutual-aid organization based in Lake Charles. “Research has proven that pollution from these facilities causes premature deaths and costs billions in health costs.” 

Ozane can outline the growth in illness that she’s seen near LNG plants, including cancer, skin rashes and seizures. “If the Trump administration really wanted to put America first,” she said, “they’d stop allowing companies to export our resources to the highest bidder at the expense of our health and safety.”

And local fishermen say that Venture Global’s first LNG facility at Calcasieu Pass has already wrought permanent damage on the fishing grounds. “The shrimping in Cameron has only gotten worse and worse since CP1 was built and, mark my words, this year will be even worse than last year,” said Travis Dardar, local fisherman and founder of Fishermen Involved in Sustaining Our Heritage. “In no way, shape or form could any fisherman coexist with Venture Global.”

Plus, CP1’s actual emissions are much higher than what permits allow, contend environmental groups like the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, which have documented repeated permit violations and operational failures at the facility.

In 2022, CP1’s first year of operation, Venture Global admitted that CP1 had more than 2,000 permit violations. This included a “preventable release” of approximately 180,099 pounds of gas on January 18, 2022, one day before the facility started gas liquefaction. 

Nearly a year ago, in April 2024, residents living next to CP1 documented excessive, unplanned flaring – an emergency means of burning off waste gas – that often signals ongoing operational problems at the facility. Though the facility is only allowed to flare for 60 hours over a year’s time, Cameron Parish residents reported that the flaring in April lasted for more than 95 continuous hours. 

In response, Venture Global issued guarantees in 2022 and 2023 that issues would be remedied. But CP1 has racked up three years of excessive violations and substandard reporting and is continuing those patterns again this year, according to the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.

Critics of the nation’s LNG buildout say that given the company’s track record at its CP1 facility, the expansion in Port Sulphur doesn’t make sense. “Authorizing Venture Global to expand Plaquemines LNG is extremely misguided. This company has proven time and time again to be untrustworthy and only concerned about its own bottom line,” said Slocum of Public Citizen.

Energy Emergency as Diplomacy

On Jan. 20, President Trump officially ramped up domestic fossil-fuel production, including natural gas, by declaring a National Energy Emergency. 

“The United States’ insufficient energy production, transportation, refining, and generation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to our Nation’s economy, national security, and foreign policy,” he wrote.”In light of these findings, I hereby declare a national emergency.”

But the U.S. is not facing a fuel shortage. 

What’s ahead is more likely a glut. The International Energy Agency predicts LNG markets will see a major oversupply in the coming years, as production increases while demand growth remains uncertain.

The massive LNG construction projects along the Gulf Coast are designed to freeze natural gas, turning it into a liquid form suitable for shipping worldwide. But expanding those facilities does not make sense either, given current natural-gas production data, which shows that the number of rigs deployed to drill for natural gas in the U.S. has decreased 32% over the last two years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Too much LNG supply could lead to a drop in LNG prices. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has made dire predictions about how creating demand for excess LNG would stunt the development of renewable technologies that could slow global warming. 

For the consumer, a fast-paced buildout of LNG plants will only raise domestic energy prices and pollute American communities, critics say. “Secretary Wright’s stop at Plaquemines Parish shows the Trump Administration’s energy dominance agenda is barreling ahead without thought or reason,” said Raena Garcia, senior energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, an international network of grassroots environmental organizations.

But at the LNG terminal in Port Sulphur that is on its way to becoming one of the world’s largest, bleak economic projections did little to dampen the excitement from Venture Global’s CEO and the two officials from the National Energy Dominance Council. 

“In the next several years, Louisiana will become a larger exporter of liquified natural gas than any nation on Earth,” Wright said, to loud applause. 

The natural outcomes of U.S. energy dominance were American prosperity and world peace, Burgum told Venture Global workers last week, pointing to two proxy wars – Russia and Iran – that are funding military operations with energy production. 

“With a facility like this where we can sell LNG around the world,” Burgum said, “we’re literally going to stop war.”