By Rich Heidorn Jr. and Michael Brooks

WASHINGTON — FERC Commissioner Richard Glick on Thursday rejected Chairman Neil Chatterjee’s claim of a bipartisan “breakthrough” on the commission’s evaluation of LNG projects, joining with fellow Democrat Cheryl LaFleur to say the panel was still ignoring the projects’ impact on climate change.

On Feb. 21, a FERC news release celebrated the commission’s 3-1 approval of the Calcasieu Pass LNG export project in Louisiana, calling it a “breakthrough … agreement that may provide a path forward” for the commission’s review of 12 other proposed LNG facilities.

The release quoted Chatterjee thanking LaFleur and Republican Commissioner Bernard McNamee for joining the chairman in the majority. It made no mention of LaFleur’s six-page concurrence, in which she disagreed with Chatterjee and McNamee for failing to disclose the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from the project (CP15-550). (See LaFleur Sides with Republicans on LNG Terminal as Glick Dissents.)

Glick, who had authored a seven-page dissent, said at Thursday’s monthly open commission meeting that the ruling was “anything but a breakthrough.”

Although the order did acknowledge the project could produce almost 4 million tons of direct GHG emissions annually, Glick said, it ignored the impact of them on climate change and “then found that the project’s environmental impacts will not be significant and that, as a result, the project is in the public’s interest.”

“I don’t want to hear that assessing significance is too hard. The commission is called upon to do it all the time in other contexts with far less information than we have in this proceeding.”

LaFleur’s Frustration

LaFleur, who has joined Glick in opposing some gas pipeline projects, wrote in her concurrence that she supported Calcasieu Pass as “not inconsistent with the public interest” based on the “governing law.”

In her comments at Thursday’s meeting, LaFleur repeated her frustration with the Republicans’ reluctance to address GHG emissions.

“We have been treating climate impacts differently than all the other environmental impacts that we look at,” she said. “We know how to quantify, mitigate [and] consider impacts to land, water and species. We make calls on whether impacts to wetlands or to a specific species of mussels are significant. But we don’t do that for climate change impacts. Instead we say we can’t figure out how to do it.”

She also complained about the split jurisdiction over LNG exports. While FERC permits the facilities and evaluates their direct environmental impacts, the Department of Energy decides whether the export of the fuel is in the public interest, including the consideration of upstream and downstream GHG emissions.

“It’s hard to do the [public interest] weighing if we’re only in charge of the impact but someone else is in charge of the benefits. I think we could be well served by looking at the lifecycle of [LNG] exports and what the aggregate climate impacts are,” she said.

“I don’t have the authority to make that happen,” she acknowledged. “In the meantime, I have to do my job, which is deal with the applications that are before us. I will continue to try to look at them case by case.”

McNamee, Chatterjee Respond

Chatterjee, who had made his opening remarks before his Democratic colleagues, did not address their comments in the open meeting.

McNamee, however, defended the commission’s order, insisting it “seriously addressed” the GHG emissions.

“I think it’s a disappointing thing that in this town, often if there’s a disagreement about how something should be done or what the conclusions are, that some will say that it wasn’t done, that they’re ignoring something,” he said.

“We have to look at each order separately. But we were able to show, at least here, that Washington can work,” he continued. “We compromised. We come together. We listen. We can get things done.”

Speaking to reporters after the meeting, Chatterjee said, “I actually thought that was a model for how constructive dialogue can take place in Washington, and I want to commend all three of my colleagues for their approach to this. I echo Commissioner McNamee’s sentiment: This is an example of how Washington can work.”

He said LaFleur was instrumental in brokering the compromise that led to the inclusion of the emissions figures and how they compare to total U.S. emissions.

“This was a big win for her,” he said. The language “was a change in a policy, a major change in policy. The commission had been approving projects in the past without the inclusion of this language. … Commissioner McNamee and myself had to get comfortable with what the legal implications of this change would be. …

“I was not completely comfortable with the change in our approach, and neither was Commissioner McNamee, but it was important that we negotiated in good faith with Commissioner LaFleur. And I for one view it as a significant accomplishment for her.”

Chatterjee also complimented Glick for his dissent.

“While he spoke very passionately, and we may disagree in our interpretation of what the Natural Gas Act allows, I commend him for his very strong and rigorous dissent because that’s the purpose of these multimember commissions. Strong dissents make the order stronger. In crafting the underlying order, we have to ensure we are dotting all our i’s and crossing all our t’s to account for all the arguments that he is making in his dissents.”

Litigation Risk?

LaFleur and Glick said the commission’s failure to consider GHG emissions creates a risk that its orders will be overturned on appeal. They cited the 2017 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals order that remanded FERC’s approval of an environmental impact statement (EIS) for the Southeast Market Pipelines Project and a federal court ruling last week faulting the Bureau of Land Management’s EIS on oil and gas drilling in Wyoming.

Glick said LNG developers could take steps to mitigate their GHG emissions, citing the Freeport LNG terminal, which he said “substantially reduced their greenhouse gas emissions … by employing all-electric compression motor drives. A developer can also offset emissions with emissions-free power. This isn’t rocket science. So, before we pat ourselves on the back and give ourselves the good government award, we need first to do our job under the law, which in this case means not ignoring the impact a project will have on climate change.”