There’s Growing Debate Around the Politics of Biden’s Natural Gas Report

Jennifer Granholm says the report tells a cautionary tale. Republicans say it’s all politics. Energy experts sit somewhere in between.

Biden LNG Exports

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has warned that increasing LNG exports would hurt consumers. Rafiq Maqbool/AP

It’s no surprise that the natural gas industry hated the Biden administration’s report on the impacts of increasing natural gas exports. Industry-allied Republicans balked at the report before it even came out, preemptively calling it bad science.

But now that it’s out, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm is getting a different kind of pushback from some in the energy research community.

Several energy experts are praising the robust analysis of the effects of liquefied natural gas exports in a new 600-page, long-awaited study from the national laboratories that the Biden administration commissioned. The research is sound, they say. Rather, they think Granholm’s statements about it veer too much into politics and mischaracterize the reports’ actual findings, several researchers told NOTUS.