(E & E News | Politico)—A Louisiana think tank and a nonprofit law firm have sued the Department of Energy over its pause on liquefied natural gas export approvals, saying the move is unconstitutional and hurts the economy.
The Pelican Institute for Public Policy and the Liberty Justice Center filed suit Thursday—more than three months after the Biden administration announced DOE’s freeze. The pause has been met with cheers from some environmental groups and widespread disapproval from the U.S. oil and gas industry.
In their filing, the Pelican Institute and the Liberty Justice Center asked the court to set aside DOE’s proclamation pausing U.S. LNG export approvals as unlawful.
“Nothing in the Natural Gas Act grants any federal officer, even the President, the authority to halt the approval process, and yet the Biden Administration has tried just that,” Loren Seehase, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, said in a news release last week.
… DOE’s decision in January “flagrantly disregards” the Natural Gas Act’s mandate to approve LNG export applications, decades of DOE policy to review LNG export applications “on a case-by-case basis” and the Administrative Procedure Act’s mandatory notice and comment rulemaking procedure, the Liberty Justice Center and the Pelican Institute said in the filing.
Read the full article on E & E News here.