U.S. natural gas exports are poised to surge as President-elect Donald Trump retakes power, putting a renewed spotlight on safety standards drafted during the Carter administration.
Back then, disco was king, incoming Vice President JD Vance hadn’t been born and the liquefied natural gas business barely resembled the industry now leading the world in exporting gas.
A dramatic expansion of LNG — with as many as 17 new production terminals on the way in the next five years — is squarely in line with Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. So is keeping the old rules written in the late 1970s.
While the Biden administration has been working on a draft of new regulations, their future is unclear. In Trump’s first term, a proposed rule got to the White House for review but was withdrawn.
Continuing to rely on old safety rules could fuel the fears of people who live near proposed sites, which in turn could give added ammunition to opponents who want to block exports.
“I don’t know why they would approve any more plants if the rules aren’t in place,” said Melanie Oldham, who lives a few miles from the Freeport LNG terminal in southeast Texas she has opposed for years. “We don’t know of course, but it could get stalled again.”
Asked about the status of the LNG rules, Trump transition spokesperson Karoline Leavitt emailed a statement that did not mention LNG but said Trump will “make America energy dominant again.”
Trump, though, has mentioned LNG — loudly. After President Joe Biden said last year that his administration would “pause” the issuance of some export permits, Trump told a crowd in Las Vegas he would approve LNG terminals “on my very first day back.”
Eight LNG terminals are operating in the United States. Five more are under construction, and another dozen or so are in various stages of permitting.
The terminals take methane from pipelines and shrink it to 1/600 of its original volume by supercooling it to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit. That allows natural gas to be crammed on to tankers the size of aircraft carriers as a liquid and shipped around the world.
The United States exported slightly more than 87 million metric tons of LNG in 2024, according to the financial firm LSEG, up from essentially nothing in 2015.
Environmental groups and others, however, are increasingly fighting natural gas exports from the United States, pointing to international calls from scientists that fossil fuel use must rapidly decline if the world is to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.
Other critics say exporting so much gas will drive up prices for people and businesses in the United States. And some also question the safety of the mammoth facilities along the coasts.
Supporters say LNG exports create jobs, improve the country’s balance of trade, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions abroad by replacing coal with natural gas.
Federal officials at the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration — part of the Transportation Department — have been working to update the safety rules for more than eight years, dating to the final years of the Obama administration. Congress has twice told the agency to revise the regulations.
But PHMSA hasn’t even published a draft.
“Advancing this rule remains a top priority and we are working to complete it as soon as possible,” PHMSA spokesperson Matt Sonneborn said in an emailed statement.
Progress on the safety update slowed after Trump took office in 2017, pledging to cut regulations and curtail new ones.
In the final year of Trump’s first term, PHMSA officials withdrew their proposed draft from the White House Office of Management and Budget. Skip Elliott, who ran PHMSA during Trump’s first term and is serving on his current transition team, did not respond to requests for comment.
Work resumed under Biden, but the LNG safety proposal was competing with other priorities, including rules for carbon capture pipelines, cracking down on methane emissions from pipelines and regulating thousands of miles of gathering pipelines that transport gas from production sites.
Even after a draft is published, PHMSA rules can take years to finalize. Facilities completed before any safety update would likely be exempt from any new standards.
PHMSA’s most recent update on regulations indicates a draft of the rules is to be sent to the White House Office of Management and Budget this month. That leaves the matter in the hands of the incoming Trump administration.
The industry’s main trade group, the Center for LNG, says on its website that the rules are outdated and that the group works with PHMSA and others to “address modernization” of the rules.
Still, the center says the industry has an “excellent” safety record.
“Safety is the cornerstone of the LNG industry in the United States and guides the entire LNG process,” the group says on its website.
Two years ago, in the wake of an explosion at an export terminal in Freeport, the Center for LNG welcomed discussion about overhauling the safety rules.
Since Trump was elected in November, though, the group has declined to comment about the status of the rules.
‘Massive facilities’
The Center for LNG’s safety webpage quotes a report from the Department of Energy as saying, “The physical and chemical properties of LNG render it safer than other commonly used hydrocarbons.”
But modern export plants use significant quantities of other hydrocarbons — such as ethane and propane — as refrigerants to shrink the gas. Unlike methane, these gases are heavier than air and can create a vaporous, flammable fog if they leak.
Leaked gas could drift along the ground until it hits an ignition source — even static electricity — and bursts into flame. Since so much gas is stored at a terminal, experts worry that damage from such a blast could spread from one part of the facility to another and spiral out of control.
“There’s no adequate safety and risk analysis going on,” said Naomi Yoder, a data manager at the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University.
One safety expert, University of Arkansas chemical engineering professor emeritus Jerry Havens, has said the worst-case accident at an LNG terminal could be 10 times worse than the scenario PHMSA uses for its safety planning.
The U.S. LNG industry has been free of catastrophic incidents causing death or injuries as exports have risen to world-leading levels in recent years,
Still, it has had troubles.
A tank leaked in 2018 at Cheniere’s Sabine Pass terminal in Louisiana, and Cameron LNG had a leak in 2019, the day after then-President Trump visited the Louisiana facility.
In June 2022, a fireball erupted at the Freeport LNG facility. The Freeport rupture took nearly one-fifth of U.S. LNG export capacity offline for months just months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine drove up European demand for U.S. gas. Freeport LNG declined to comment last month about the safety rules.
Freeport is now embroiled in litigation with the contractor that built its export facilities, and the contractor, Zachry Holdings, filed last year for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Freeport has accused Zachry of “gross negligence” after finding “significant defects” in Zachry’s installation of electric motors at the terminal. Zachry said the equipment it installed has operated without failure.
Trump’s backers in the oil and gas industry haven’t said much about LNG safety rules, but they made clear during the presidential campaign that accelerating exports is a top priority. And Biden’s “pause” on LNG permitting was one of their chief complaints.
Biden put DOE’s LNG export permit approvals to non-free trade agreement countries on hold nearly a year ago to review their effects. The resulting study — released last month — found that “unfettered” exports could raise gas prices in the United States.
Trump’s supporters have put their money behind their gripes. The oil and gas industry spent $23 million helping Trump get elected, according to the campaign finance website Opensecrets.org.
Of that, more than $10 million came from Kelcy Warren, the executive chair of Dallas-based Energy Transfer, which has been struggling to get a permit it needs from Biden’s Department of Energy for its Lake Charles LNG project in Louisiana. Energy Transfer did not respond to a request for comment.
Safety regulators have already missed two transformations of the LNG industry.
The current rules were enacted in 1980 after being drafted in the late 1970s. LNG was used primarily as a backup supply for gas-fired power plants when demand peaked. It was referred to as “peak shaving.”
“These massive facilities weren’t even thought of as a possibility when the current safety standards were written,” said Bill Caram, executive director of the Pipeline Safety Trust, a main advocacy group for pipeline and LNG safety.
During the George W. Bush administration, fears of natural gas shortages drove construction of massive gas import terminals. But those quickly became obsolete when U.S. oil and gas companies tapped new domestic reserves with improvements in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
The bounty of the fracking boom was so vast that the importers did a complete 180-degree turn. They rushed to build massive export terminals along the Gulf Coast. In some cases they converted the import facilities into export terminals.
But the safety rules didn’t make the turn. They just stood still.
“The safety rules should be at the top of everyone’s mind,” said Texas Southern University’s Yoder, “regardless of which administration is in charge.”
