by Nick Pope
The House Oversight and Accountability Committee is inviting top Biden administration energy officials to a December 4 hearing on the administration’s decision to withhold approvals for certain novel liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities.
Subcommittee on Economic Growth, Energy Policy and Regulatory Affairs Chairman Pat Fallon, a Republican from Texas, will host a hearing featuring senior Department of Energy (DOE) official Brad Crabtree and top Biden climate adviser Jan Podesta were invited. The hearing will continue oversight of one of the Biden administration’s most aggressive moves political movements towards conventional energy, what legislators intend to ask allegations that the Department of Energy effectively concealed a draft 2023 study that would have undermined the justification for a pause before officially announcing the freeze in January 2024.
A federal court has lifted Biden’s natural gas export freeze, but the feds may not lift a finger any time soon.https://t.co/Xe5vKepY5t
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) July 5, 2024
“The Biden-Harris administration’s decision to halt new LNG exports harms our energy production and security. The House Oversight and Accountability Committee has repeatedly called on the Biden-Harris Administration Department of Energy to provide full transparency regarding its decision to ban exports of new LNG,” Fallon said in a statement shared with the Daily Caller News Foundation. “However, Biden-Harris administration officials may have obstructed the investigation and withheld critical information from Congress and the American people. This hearing is an opportunity to get further answers for the American people and to hear from those behind these policies why LNG exports have been effectively banned, causing harm to industry and labor.”
The Biden-Harris administration has said that when it formally announces a decision to introduce novel production capacity, it must conduct a review of the potential environmental, economic and safety impacts of LNG exports to ensure that approving novel production capacity remains in the public interest. pause. However, Government Accountability and Oversight (GAO), a government watchdog group, says that the administration could have actually conducted – or started to conduct – such a review in 2023 before effectively burying it because it could have drawn politically inconvenient conclusions.
First, the GAO accusations reported by the DCNF in early October, prompting the Oversight and Accountability Committee and other lawmakers to do so demand answers and transparency on this matter from the Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. DOE is roach prepare to release an analysis of LNG’s climate impact later this week, as Americans celebrate Thanksgiving.
It’s not entirely clear how the study and its conclusions might impact the LNG export regulatory process or developers’ appetite for legal risk, though the incoming Trump administration is apparently is preparing to release exports soon after returning to power in January 2025.
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Nick Pope is a reporter for the Daily Caller News Foundation.
