WV leaders pro-gas and oil industry despite heavy costs | Legislative Session

What drew Manchin’s ire was the White House’s pause of determinations on pending applications for export of liquefied natural gas, known as LNG, to countries with which the United States hasn’t entered into an applicable free trade agreement. The pause doesn’t affect operating LNG facilities or exports already approved.

The White House attributed the move, announced Jan. 26, to a commitment to analyzing economic, national security and environmental considerations regarding LNG exports.

The pause, Manchin suggested, was a “political ploy” that insufficiently considered consumer costs, energy security and helping allies with LNG exports.

Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia executive director Charlie Burd claimed LNG increases energy access and supports economic growth in a statement urging the White House to “think twice” before threatening energy freedoms.

Burd flanked West Virginia Senate President Craig Blair, R-Berkeley, and other state senators at the Capitol as Blair railed against the Biden administration for its limited LNG pause in a video Blair’s campaign X account posted six days later.

“We’re pushing back,” Blair said.

West Virginia lawmakers’ pro-gas and oil industry push over the first half of the 2024 regular legislative session has been extensive.

Proposals have advanced in the Republican-supermajority Legislature that would:

• to address abandoned wells.

• of underground carbon dioxide injection wells sought by the industry.
• Expand enhanced oil recovery from wells.

• on community air monitoring data use in third-party lawsuits and West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection enforcement action.

But the moves from West Virginia’s federal and state leaders made in the name of economics threaten to add to what already have been heavy costs incurred by West Virginians at the pump and in their utility and tax bills in support of the gas and oil industry.

LNG is a natural gas cooled to a liquid state so it can be transported to places pipelines can’t reach and be used as a transportation fuel.

New export terminals have increased U.S. LNG exports each year since 2016, a trend the U.S. Energy Information Administration said last year positioned the country, among Qatar and Australia, as one of the top three LNG-exporting nations in the world. The EIA forecast LNG exports would keep growing in 2024.

The EIA has cited increased LNG exports as a main culprit behind U.S. natural gas spot and residential price increases since 2019, in line with a general expectation that decreases in supply will lead to higher prices.

The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, an Ohio-based market research firm that aims to accelerate the transition to renewable energy, has estimated that if domestic gas prices remained at their long-term average, U.S. consumers would have spent roughly $111 billion less on wholesale natural gas purchases from September 2021 through December 2022.

The firm called the calculated sum a “$111 billion windfall for the gas industry” and estimated homeowners and renters paid gas companies an additional $14 billion as global LNG prices soared due to supply issues related to the Russia-Ukraine war.

“It’s high time for the consumer effects of LNG exports to receive the attention they deserve,” the firm said in its Jan. 29 analysis. “The more export capacity we have, the more likely it is that a gas supply disruption anywhere in the world will trigger a price spike here at home.”

Energy Innovation, a San Francisco-based climate policy firm, published a report this month finding approving pending LNG export terminals would increase near-term expenses on natural gas by U.S. households, businesses and industry by $11 billion to $18 billion each year.

The U.S. natural gas electric power price skyrocketed from $2.99 per thousand cubic feet in 2019 to $7.51 in 2022, pushing costs up for electric utilities that rely on gas.

Those costs have been passed on to West Virginia electric ratepayers through hundreds of millions of dollars in fuel cost rate hikes for utilities controlled by American Electric Power and FirstEnergy.

The Industrial Energy Consumers of America, a nonpartisan association of manufacturing companies, addressed a letter to Department of Energy Secretary…