New liquefied natural gas plants now threaten those wetlands. “I live in a place that never gets dark no more.”Ī fisherman holds up an alligator gar, a type of fish native to the Louisiana marsh. each morning and the light pollution from the company’s round-the-clock construction. He described the roar of pipeline workers’ airboats at 6 a.m. “I said it would never happen, then you wake up and here it is,” said Henry McAnespy, a fisherman who grew up in the parish and lives down the road from the project. And Venture Global is already working on another plant in the parish, known as Delta LNG. The broad ocean skyline of the parish vanished behind a maze of steel. Acres of wetland disappeared underneath concrete. The streets around the plant became choked with truck traffic, the marsh threaded with pipelines and the quiet replaced with the din of construction. In the 18 months since construction on Plaquemines LNG began, Venture Global has transformed the lives of people who have lived in the 23,000-person parish for generations. The opening will represent a triumph for gas drillers that have sought to sell more of their product abroad and for President Joe Biden, who has championed American gas exports to ensure “the reliable supply of global energy” as Europe weans itself off gas imported from Russia following that country’s invasion of Ukraine. When the facility becomes operational in 2025, tanker ships will be able to plug into it and offload more than 20 million metric tons of natural gas each year. Venture Global’s terminal in Plaquemines Parish will cool natural gas down to its liquid form so it can be loaded onto ships and exported around the world. Two of Plaquemines LNG’s 130-foot cylindrical storage tanks tower above the swamp. Subscribe to receive Canary's latest news GET HOME SAFE.” A large metal pipe extends out of the facility and over the highway, bound for the river. At a break in the levee wall that surrounds the property, a sign warns of the hazards inside: “WORK THE PLAN. It encompasses thousands of feet of coiled steel pipes for supercooling gas, 130-foot cylindrical storage tanks and flare stacks that expel tall airborne flames while the plant operates. Built on 630 acres of former swampland, an area larger than New Orleans’ French Quarter, the facility known as Plaquemines LNG extends along more than a mile of the Mississippi River. Towering over this patchwork of lowland and swamp is a massive liquefied natural gas export terminal owned by the Virginia-based Venture Global LNG, one of three in Louisiana. You’ll pass small fishing hamlets, clusters of trailers lining bayous and carcasses of old houses. In this part of the Louisiana coast, most exit roads lead over levees and into wetlands traversed by local fishermen and pipeline workers. The border between land and water, solid ground and swamp, seems to dissolve. There, strip malls and highways give way to wide expanses of cypress and low marshes that are home to white-tailed deer, alligators and pelicans. To visit the country’s newest hub for exporting liquefied gas to Europe, follow the Mississippi River southeast from New Orleans, past the recently shuttered Phillips 66 refinery in Alliance and deeper into Plaquemines Parish, a ribbon of land that flanks the lower Mississippi River before dropping off into the Gulf of Mexico. Small Gulf Coast communities pay the price of booming LNG exports
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