West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, along with a collation of 16 states, has won a stay of the Biden administration’s ban on new liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports.
The U.S. District Court Western District of Louisiana Lake Charles Division granted the coalition’s motion for preliminary injunction and ordered the LNG export ban “be stayed in its entirety, effective immediately.”
“This is a big win for the country’s energy industry and the millions of jobs it supports against the attacks from the Biden administration to further its radical climate change agenda at the expense of our economy,” Attorney General Morrisey said. “This administration’s Energy Department has no such authority to justify this ban— authority on matters like this lies with Congress and Congress alone.”
The Attorney General also co-led a 22-state letter in February urging the administration to end its pause on LNG exports.
On Jan. 26, Biden halted all new approvals of LNG exports to non-Free-Trade Agreement countries effective immediately. That decision ignores the Natural Gas Act’s presumption in favor of exports, decades of Department of Energy policy and state and private reliance on exports.
West Virginia is the country’s fourth largest producer of natural gas. As the coalition’s motion explained, the LNG ban threatens the tens of millions of dollars of severance taxes that West Virginia derives from natural gas and the thousands of jobs supported by the industry in the state.
The court’s order noted that the states had shown “evidence of harm” from the ban “specifically to Louisiana, Texas, and West Virginia in the loss of revenues, market share, and deprivation of a procedural right.”
International trade in LNG has spiked in part because of the abundant natural gas resources in the U.S.
The U.S. is the world leader in natural gas production and became the top exporter of LNG in 2023—exporting an unprecedented 86 million metric tons. There are also nearly 187 million Americans using natural gas, supporting more than four million jobs.
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