On government accountability and oversight
by GAO Webadmin
Energy Department court documents support claims of suppressed 2023 study; LNG ‘pause’ based on a lie
After months of delays and ignoring numerous legal obligations and deadlines, the Biden Department of Energy, through its lawyers at the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, leaked something in a recently filed complaint that it had tried to prevent from being made public for a year, including three months of litigation.
Specifically, the DoE has identified “97 potentially relevant documents totaling 4,354 pages” with the following description:
1) any LNG export study submitted by the National Energy Technology Lab to the Office of Fossil Energy between January 1, 2023, and October 31, 2023, and 2) the email(s) by which the documents were transmitted from the National Energy Technology Labs (NETL) to, among others, the DoE's Office of Fossil Energy.
This is the scope of a GAO Freedom of Information Act request, the parameters of which were very deliberately chosen for reasons that GAO has laid out here. Not only did DoE admit that records exist after months of delaying tactics (see below), but it also repeatedly used vague wordplay in its initial proposals for this report to the court. It avoided disclosing the fact until it was pressed by GAO lawyers to admit that most basic of answers – what have you got?
In addition, the Department of Energy had been aware of this fact for six weeks but refused to disclose it, despite being given a legal and judicial deadline:
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These delays were not only due to bureaucratic laziness. To avoid admitting that these records existed in the FOIA litigation brought by GAO, the DoE filed requests for extensions of time, for stays of proceedings, for the joining of unrelated cases, causing further delays, and simply refused to provide even court-ordered answers.
This admission that the Department of Energy actually has copies of such a study on LNG exports strongly suggests that the administration has been telling the public a spectacular untruth about the basis for “this crazy LNG permitting pause.” [t]the consequences [of which] will have devastating consequences for the industry in four to five years, but they are already having national security implications.”
As a reminder, the stated reason for this “pause” was that the Department of Energy needed to conduct a macroeconomic study on the costs and benefits of LNG exports.
But we see that this has already happened, which, in short, means that the alleged basis for the “pause” in LNG exports does not seem to hold water. This falsehood serves as a pretext for this latest move to “push through President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris' climate agenda, which focuses on limiting natural gas exports. Environmentalists argue that increased gas exports could lead to far more domestic drilling and, as a result, more emissions.”
The decision to impose this “pause” caused shock throughout the energy industry, among U.S. allies, and some other insiders. One of those people let slip that the Energy Department had actually done such an analysis back in 2023, but swept it under the rug because the conclusions would not support the preferred policy of choking options for abundant, often “fracked” U.S. natural gas. With fewer things to do with the gas (hello, they definitely don't want to ban gas stoves, that's a conspiracy theory, akshully, it's a good thing they damn well want to do that), opposition to fracking could be weakened.
The Department of Energy conducts these studies with some regularity. The most recent (accepted) version, the 2018 DoE report, was 144 pages long. The 2014 report was much shorter, at 42 pages.
The Energy Department now admits through a lawyer that its search turned up 97 documents, or 4,354 pages. That's an average of 45 pages per document (email threads are shorter, of course). The most reasonable conclusion from this is that NETL sent out multiple versions of the alleged report during those ten months. Or, to put it more simply: Yes, it appears that the report that the Energy Department supposedly needs to produce before it can proceed with LNG exports to non-FTA countries has already been produced and kept under wraps.
The Department of Energy is clearly in no hurry to provide further details to the public, as it took three months too long to provide the basic answer: Yes, the study exists.
postscript: To date, the DoE has only responded to one of the four requests made in early June, providing records in response to the request for “chat” transcripts for certain senior officials for the three days surrounding (and inclusive of) the January “break”.
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It appears that the Department of Energy and the White House were “on the same page” when it came to announcing the “pause” and the pretext. But the truth will come out, and this latest confession is damning.
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