George Kaiser on the Gulf (Part 2)

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. Part 1 is here.

Again

These articles examine George Kaiser’s participation in the Gulf Coast liquefied natural gas (LNG) boom. His company, Excelerate Energy, recently struck an agreement with Venture Global for its forthcoming Plaquemines LNG terminal.

That facility, in southeastern Louisiana, is one of five under construction in the U.S. All of them are on the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s a grim development.

“The greenhouse gas emissions equal to a small city”

“LNG facilities are enormous,” Naomi Yoder, a Staff Scientist with Healthy Gulf, told me. “An export terminal is an enormous footprint. Each one can produce—roughly—the greenhouse gas emissions equal to a small city.”

Plaquemines LNG, according to its final environmental impact statement, will emit over 8 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO_2e)—an umbrella term for a range of greenhouse gases—every year. It’s like 1.6 million new cars appearing in Plaquemines Parish, or placing two coal-fired power plants there. Those are the greenhouse gas levels.

Building and profiting from Plaquemines LNG is therefore—and it seems almost too obvious to mention this—the exact opposite of what climate scientists and energy economists advise. Groups like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency have called, for years, for fossil fuel phase-outs.

But the Plaquemines facility’s impacts only begin here.

“A major source of toxic air pollutants”

“Here you see the particulate matter, the SO₂, the nitrogen oxide, and the carbon monoxide. And then the volatiles—those are the ones that are the most toxic,” Wilma Subra explained.

She was helping me work through a table listing Plaquemines LNG’s permitted emissions; the table is part of a Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) assessment. “This is what I do—seven days a week, 20 hours a day,” she confessed.

For four decades, she could have added. She founded Subra Company in 1981 “to provide technical assistance to community groups dealing with environmental human health issues.” Before that, she spent 14 years at the Gulf South Research Institute, where she helmed “the Analytical Chemistry and Environmental Sciences section.” The MacArthur Foundation awarded her a “Genius Grant” in 1999.

Drawing on her experience and expertise, Wilma illuminated the human costs of the Plaquemines facility. As the site produces LNG for Kaiser’s Excelerate Energy to ship worldwide, it will emit some two dozen substances classified as toxic under Louisiana law. Highlights include n-hexane, which can cause reproductive damage, and formaldehyde, a carcinogen.

These emissions make the terminal, according to Louisiana officials, “a major source of toxic air pollutants.” For Wilma, the implications for area residents are clear: “This is what they’re going to be inhaling every day, every night, for the rest of their lives. And the rest of their families’ lives.”

“Alarms go off all the time”

Available data gives just a partial sense of the plant’s harms. Wilma described the DEQ’s projections as “the best they can put together to estimate what the emissions will be.” Factor in the unexpected—accidents; leaks—and “it goes way over these numbers.”

Venture Global’s record suggests worst-case planning is prudent. Its Calcasieu Pass terminal, in southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish, is “technologically-identical” to Plaquemines LNG—and plagued with problems.

“There are consistent miscalculations of releases from the facility,” the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, an environmental justice group, documented, noting also that “Venture Global is under-reporting accidents” there.

As these incidents accumulate, Venture Global relays little information to the surrounding community. “Alarms go off all the time,” James Hiatt, founder of For a Better Bayou, told me. “What those alarms mean—it has never been conveyed to the people.”

“Catastrophic release of chemical contaminants”

There’s another alarm to heed. In Louisiana, it sounds every few years as storm-driven waters overspill banks and barriers, drowning neighborhoods and—with time—disappearing ancestral homes.

Venture Global’s project could intensify these Gulf-area hurricanes. And not only from greenhouse emissions: the terminal’s construction results in the “permanent loss of 368 acres of wetlands.”

Wetlands are “our best defense against storm surge,” Jessi Parfait, an anthropologist and member of the United Houma Nation (UHN), explained. “They act like a little speed bump for storms coming in off the Gulf—that slow things down before they’re able to get in our communities. And the more we lose of that, the less protection we have.”

The Plaquemines LNG site is especially vulnerable. Hurricane Ida flooded it on August 29, 2021. Eleven days later, a team from Healthy Gulf chartered a flyover, finding the land “was still submerged.”

Venture Global claims its 26-foot floodwall will hold back rising waters. Analysts disagree. Ivor van Heerden, the hurricane expert who warned—years before Katrina—of the ruin storms could visit on southern Louisiana, assessed the facility.

He found “substantial design flaws in the proposed storm wall.” If breached, and if Plaquemines LNG were damaged, there could be a “catastrophic release of chemical contaminants,” with an “immense” impact on plant and animal life.

“Not actually land anymore”

These threats mount in an imperiled region. “Plaquemines Parish is one of those places that is losing substantial amounts of land,” Jessi Parfait observed—some “50% of its land since the ‘70s,” according to Naomi Yoder.

And that loss affects the UHN tribe, “who has called,” Jessi explained, “the lands of South Louisiana home forever.” Forced migration is a recurring event in their history. “And now,” she lamented, “because of climate change and land loss, we’re going to be—yet again—forced to move.”

UHN territories—besides Plaquemines, the Houma service area spans Terrebonne, Lafourche, Jefferson, St. Mary, and St. Bernard Parishes—are already vanishing.  Jessi recalled a recent voyage she took with a tribal elder to visit “their family’s historic lands.” 

They went by water, because the territory “is not actually land anymore.” 

Coda

Excelerate Energy’s annual reports, filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, reveal George Kaiser’s authority over the firm. He controls “75.8% of the total combined voting power,” authorizing him to make “any material change in the nature of the business or operations of [the] company.”

Another 7.9%, when Excelerate went public last year, was controlled by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. More on his nonprofit’s links to his business interests next week, in the final installment in this series.