George Kaiser on the Gulf (Part 1)

How he makes his billions

This is a revised, expanded version of a radio series that aired on Focus: Black Oklahoma from July-September this year.

“The Tulsan of the Century”

He was “the Tulsan of the Year”—if not the century, the Tulsa World decided. The paper meant George Kaiser, in 2018, after his Gathering Place opened along the Arkansas River.

Some 600 miles away, at the mouth of another river, George Kaiser is unknown. There’s no coverage of his acclaim-winning philanthropy, of his multibillion-dollar banking and resource empire.

But in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, where the Mississippi runs into the Gulf of Mexico, Kaiser is quietly investing in a major project. It’s “the most expensive plant ever built in this part of the world”—and it imperils the climate, while reinforcing rooted inequities.

“A travel advisory warning”

Plaquemines Parish needs “a travel advisory warning,” Michelle A. Charles, a public defender in southeast Louisiana, told me. A warning like the NAACP’s, issued for Florida in May, urging people of color to exercise extreme care in all parts of the state. A warning “for Black people,” she stressed.

“Plaquemines Parish is full of corruption,” her friend Melissa Washington agreed. And its police, Michelle added, are “lawless”—“the actual perpetrators of the crimes” there.

The evidence for corruption and criminality is diffuse—scattered across news sites, social media posts, and blogs—but damning:

• Plaquemines deputies “repeatedly kicking a 12-year-old suspect”;

• a Parish deputy winning a departmental award after serving multiple suspensions;

• Plaquemines officials illegally “censoring constituent comments” online; 

• the Parish sheriff rebuilding a prison, leveled by Hurricane Katrina, “on endangered land, with needless capacity, at immense cost”—and later sentenced to 46 months on a conspiracy charge.

Events like these make the region, for Michelle, Melissa, and the other people of color I interviewed, a hostile place. 

But it’s not all bad. There’s also the natural gas boom there—the coming windfall that attracted George Kaiser.

“This new strategic partnership”

In February, George Kaiser’s Excelerate Energy—the liquefied natural gas (LNG) firm that, when it went public last year, raised his net worth by $1.4 billion—entered a “new strategic partnership” with Venture Global, the Virginia-based LNG supplier. The companies struck a sales and purchase agreement: 

• Every year, for 20 years, Excelerate will purchase 700,000 tons of LNG from Venture Global’s forthcoming Plaquemines export terminal;

• Excelerate will ship the LNG, via its floating storage and regasification units, to points worldwide.

Announced in December 2016, and expected to start operating next year, Venture Global’s Plaquemines facility is some 20 miles southeast of New Orleans. When I drove by, truck convoys were entering and leaving the site, where two finished storage tanks loomed 130 feet above Louisiana Highway 23. The completed project will occupy 632 acres, along 1.3 miles of Mississippi Riverfront—in direct proximity to the Parish’s historically Black communities.

“We had no place to go”

Ironton, just six miles from Venture Global’s Plaquemines project, is one of these towns. Tracy Riley, a retired Army Major and President of the Plaquemines Parish NAACP, recounted its saga when we met at Lil Lee’s Café, in Belle Chasse, in early May.

The community’s members—“total: maybe 100 people”—trace their history to the Civil War’s aftermath, when their ancestors “left the St. Rosalie Plantation.” Andrew Durnford, a free man of color, owned that estate—and its 77 enslaved Black people—until his death in 1859. Once emancipated, many of these formerly-enslaved people “migrated just south of where they had been been required to live and work.”

They founded what is now Ironton. “And they transferred information to their descendants: keep the property; protect it; stay on it. Never sell. And that was a big deal for newly-freed enslaved people,” Tracy concluded. “Because we had no place to go.”

“They don’t care about Ironton”

A similar rootlessness defines Melissa Washington’s life today. Her family is from Ironton; she still has a home there. But she has been in Jefferson Parish, northwest of Plaquemines—“displaced since 2021,” she explained. “Since Ida hit.”

The hurricane struck late that August. A local reporter, Shay O’Connor, traveled the state surveying damage, judging Ironton’s “the worst devastation that I’ve seen.” The flooding submerged the town for weeks. Caskets, displaced by water, floated into yards, drifting beneath elevated homes.

Audrey Trufant Salvant, an Ironton resident and former Parish Council member, called Ida “a manmade disaster.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she told DeSmog, had abandoned “a plan for levee protection made after Katrina,” 16 years earlier, that would have shielded the town.

Protecting Ironton’s residents—attending to their health—has been a low priority for local officials:

• The town had no running water until 1980. 

• For a half-century, the Alliance Refinery sat a few miles upriver. In 2010, it emitted 431,000 pounds of cancer-causing chemicals.

• Kinder Morgan’s International Marine Terminal, which exports coal, is two miles south of Ironton. Its dust coated Ironton homes and gardens, and satellite imagery documented “coal-polluted water spreading from the facility in black plumes.”

“They don’t care about Ironton,” Melissa bristled, “because it’s a bunch of Black people.”

“It’s not for people there”

Venture Global’s Plaquemines terminal is in this grand tradition, promising its neighbors a range of health and environmental harms.

And “it’s not even providing gas for local residents,” Naomi Yoder, a Staff Scientist with Healthy Gulf, emphasized. “It’s for export”—for Excelerate’s vessels to cart to Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, Finland, Germany, Pakistan, and the UAE. 

“It just is adding insult to injury,” they went on, “that there’s this massive facility,” reaping an $834 million tax break, a ten-minute drive from Melissa’s still-unlivable Ironton home. 

The proximity lays Parish priorities bare: “You can build a massive facility,” Naomi asks, “but you can’t build some houses?” 

Coda

George Kaiser’s turn to Plaquemines, as a profit source, also shows us something of his concerns. 

We learn little about these in Oklahoma. Missing from local coverage is any discussion of how Kaiser makes billions from oil and gas. The Tulsa World’s archive names Excelerate Energy in just 13 pieces, and most of these amount to press releases. The state’s investigative outlets—Frontier, NonDoc, Oklahoma Watch—have never reported on, or even mentioned, the firm. Silence here. 

But in Louisiana: two ticking time bombs: Venture Global’s LNG terminal, and the warming Gulf waters the project will further heat. More next week.