From Government Accountability & Oversight

by GAO Webadmin

DoE court filing supports claims of buried 2023 study, LNG “pause” based on a lie

In a recent court filing, after months of stalling and flouting numerous legal obligations and deadlines the Biden-Harris Department of Energy, through its lawyers at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, let slip something it had spent a year, including three months in litigation, trying to avoid becoming known.

Specifically, DoE has “identified 97 potentially responsive documents totaling 4,354 pages” of records meeting the following description:

 1) any LNG export study transmitted by the National Energy Technology Lab to the Office of Fossil Energy between January 1, 2023 and October 31, 2023, and 2) the email(s) transmitting the document(s) from the National Energy Technology Labs (NETL) to, inter alia, DoE’s Office of Fossil Energy.

This is the scope of a Freedom of Information Act request by GAO, whose parameters were very deliberately chosen, for reasons GAO laid out here. DoE’s admission that records exist came not only after months of stall tactics (below), but also repeatedly vague wordplay in its first offerings for this report to the court, avoiding disclosure of the fact until pressed by GAO lawyers to admit this most basic of answers—what have you got?

Further, DoE had known this particular something for six weeks and refused to let on, again despite statutory and judicially imposed deadlines to do so:

These delays were not mere bureaucratic sloth. In FOIA litigation brought by GAO, to avoid admitting these records exist DoE employed motions seeking extensions of time, motions to stay proceedings, motions  to tie unrelated cases together causing further delays, and outright refusal to provide even court-ordered answers.

This confession that DoE indeed has copies of such a study on liquified natural gas exports strongly indicates that the administration has been telling a spectacular non-truth to the public about the basis for “this crazy LNG permitting pause [t]he consequences [of which] will be dire for the industry in four to five years, but they also carry national security implications now.”

Recall, the stated reason for this “pause” was that DoE needed to conduct a macroeconomic study of the costs and benefits of LNG exports.

But we see it had already done so meaning, in very short, the supposed basis for “pausing” LNG exports appears to be untrue, the falsehood serving as pretext for this latest gambit to impose “President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s climate agenda, which has focused on limiting natural gas exports. Environmentalists argue that increased gas exports could result in far more domestic drilling and, as a result, more emissions.”

The decision to impose this “pause” caused shock throughout the energy industry, among U.S. allies… and among some others in the know. One of those people let the word go forth that in fact DoE had already conducted such an analysis, in 2023, but buried it because the conclusions would not support the preferred policy of strangling options for abundant, often “fracked” U.S. natural gas. With fewer things to do with the gas (hello, gas stoves they definitely don’t want to ban that’s a conspiracy theory akshully it’s a good thing that heck yeah they sure do want to do that), the opposition to fracking could be worn down.

DoE conducts these studies with some regularity, The most recent (acknowledged) version, the 2018 DoE report, ran 144 pages. The 2014 report was much shorter, at 42 pages.

DoE now admits through counsel that its search produced 97 documents/4,354 pages. This averages 45 pages a document (email threads will be shorter, of course). The most reasonable conclusion from this is that NETL sent several versions of the rumored report over these ten months. Or, put more simply: yes, it appears that the report which DoE claims to need to conduct before continuing LNG exports to non-FTA countries had already been prepared, and buried.

DoE is plainly in no hurry to let the public in on any further details, having taken three months too long to state the basic answer: yes, the study exists.

Post Script: To date, DoE has only responded to one of the four requests made in early June, producing records in response to the request for “chat” logs for certain senior officials over the three days surrounding and including the January “pause”.

It appears that DoE and the White House were “on the same page” in announcing the “pause” and the pretext. But the truth will out, and this recent confession is damning.