Peering into the Rio Grande Valley’s fossil fuel future

From the Texas Observer:

For the Gulf Coast oil and gas industry, the mini-region around the 50-mile-long Laguna Madre is the final frontier.

A rare hypersaline lagoon that separates the Padre islands from the deep South Texas mainland, the Laguna Madre is ringed in its southern reach by the small coastal communities of Port Isabel, Laguna Heights, Laguna Vista, Long Island Village, and South Padre Island. This area has long avoided the oil refineries and gas processing plants that dominate cities farther up the Gulf like Corpus Christi, Houston, Freeport, Galveston, and Port Arthur. What little presence the oil and gas industry has had here centered on shipping product out of the Brownsville Ship Channel, which connects the eponymous city to the lagoon, and this activity mostly dried up late last century.

But all that is changing. This summer, two storage tanks for the huge new liquefied natural gas project, Rio Grande LNG, have emerged to towering heights over the state highway that links Brownsville, some 20 miles west, to the 5,000-person town of Port Isabel. The project, set to be the first of its kind in the Rio Grande Valley, will chill gas coming through pipelines—laid over the past decade amid the country’s “shale revolution”—into liquid form 1/600th the substance’s previous size. This liquefied gas will then be exported via massive tanker ships past the jetties of South Padre Island and across the world. The under-construction project has already poured concrete over nearly a thousand acres of ecologically fragile wetlands and lomas, clay dunes formed over thousands of years.

This transformative development has been aggressively touted by NextDecade, the publicly traded Houston-based company behind Rio Grande LNG, as a job creator that will be environmentally sensitive and won’t affect tourism. But locals say it threatens existing ecotourism and fishing industries, and federal regulators have agreed, pointing to the number of LNG tankers coming in and out of the ship channel.

Nearly 100 years ago, Cameron County commissioners initiated the creation of the Brownsville Ship Channel, wanting the Valley to venture into a new phase of global economic engagement by exporting the area’s plentiful citrus and cotton overseas. As decades wore on, companies like Marathon built offshore oil rigs at the Port of Brownsville and employed hundreds before closing in the late 1980s after the country’s oil bust. Union Carbide, a chemical manufacturer, met the same fate as butane prices doubled, leaving workers jobless after the plant closed.

Trade, logistics, rig-building, and shipbreaking haven’t left the port, with the various companies there employing about 3,400 people. But today’s officials in Brownsville—population 190,000—want something bigger: to bring back the oil and gas industry as part of a region-wide attempt to remake the area’s economy into a hub of international corporate investment. To help realize this vision, Rio Grande LNG is fronting the cost of dredging the channel deep enough for some of the largest tankers ever made to traverse.

But local organizers say philanthropy doesn’t excuse the lucrative tax breaks it takes in or the pollution it spews out. “They are not interested in being good neighbors, except for doing things that will put their name on a water tower or school or something and make them look good,” Gary Witt, a retired marketing professor and chair of the Better Brazoria organization, told me in May at Sweet T’s, a downtown diner.

In the streets outside, broken glass, downed fences, and shingles were still littered from last year’s Hurricane Beryl. This part of the city was mostly lifeless, despite being next to Port Freeport and a couple miles from Freeport LNG.

Since 2015, the local school district, Brazoria County, the City of Freeport, and a neighboring city have given Freeport LNG a combined $1 billion in tax abatement deals. The City of Freeport alone is projected to forgo over $321 million in property taxes for Freeport LNG, according to an economic analysis commissioned by Better Brazoria, by the time the agreement ends in 2029. The city has opted for payments in lieu of taxes, receiving about $2 million a year from the company.

Freeport LNG says the tax handouts are well worth the project’s contributions to the local tax base. Company spokesperson Heather Browne told the Observer the corporation will pay “$2.6 billion in taxes to local Brazoria County taxing jurisdictions over the course of the company’s initial 20-year operating life,” on top of generating additional taxable economic activity. In company literature, Freeport LNG has said it employs 230 people in Brazoria County and created 9,000 construction jobs during its build-out, which took about five years. Although the company receives more tax abatements than any other entity in the county, it’s not among the top 10 largest employers in Freeport, last year’s city budget shows.

Since exports began, Census data shows median income rose and poverty rates fell in Freeport at levels exceeding state and nationwide trends. Donald Payne, an economics professor at Brazosport College, said the gas facility is one part of the explanation: “Since 2019, Freeport LNG, the Port of Freeport, and the petrochemical industry all experienced growth. Together, they created hundreds of high-wage jobs directly and many more indirectly,” Payne told the Observer in an email, though he noted that “Based on personal experience, many Freeport LNG workers appear to live outside the city.”

A short drive from downtown Freeport are Quintana, population 30, and its beaches, where Freeport LNG’s liquefaction plant looms. The facility occupies much of the island town, or what’s left of it. Some of the few people who live there now work for the company or the county beach park on the north end of the island. Most of the town’s annual revenue comes from the roughly $1 million a year Freeport LNG pays directly as part of a property tax break deal. One council member is an employee of the company.

Quintana is a major stopover for migratory birds, with at least 325 species documented there. The island’s observation tower was constructed by Freeport LNG, and some of the land that makes up bird and nature sanctuaries was donated by the company. The hum of nearby tanker ships competes constantly with birdsong.

The beaches are usually well attended in the summer—as they were when the LNG plant exploded in 2022. The explosion, which damaged the LNG facility and caused a toddler on the beach to injure his face on a rock, was caused by trapped gas that burst through a pipe and was ignited by a damaged wire. A contributing cause, a federal investigation found, was an overworked, understaffed crew. Three years before, the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) had fined Freeport LNG after operators pushed gas at 917 pounds per square inch of pressure through a pipe rated for just 90 pounds, breaking the pipe and releasing 315 million feet of gas.

Two busloads of kids on a field trip were on the beach during the explosion, two locals who were present told the Observer. People were unsure what to do. Local authorities issued a voluntary evacuation notice. Those who left the island had to drive past the site of the explosion as the company contained the fire. When federal regulators held a public briefing for residents to learn about the explosion, Freeport LNG didn’t attend.

Melanie Oldham, the executive director of Better Brazoria, said the company needs to update its public emergency response plan. “How do people know how or where to evacuate? Do they try to get over this one bridge?” she asked as we drove back to Freeport from Quintana. Browne, the Freeport LNG spokesperson, told the Observer that the safety of its workforce and community is “top priority” for the company. Regarding the explosion, Browne referred to the company’s 2022 Sustainability and Community Investment report, which points to the company fixing and modifying the valves that led to the incident, hiring more employees, and retraining staff. She declined to comment on Oldham’s statement about the response plan.

Since the 2022 explosion, Freeport LNG has continued to have “emissions events,” which are unplanned releases of chemicals. The plant and its pretreatment facility have had 98 since the explosion and 134 before that, amounting to hundreds of thousands of pounds of air pollution, including benzene and carbon monoxide. In all, Freeport LNG has paid around $2.6 million in fines to various federal and state agencies. Freeport LNG is now planning to add a fourth “train,” the machines that cool gas into liquid.

Local governments in the area have backed the company through more than just tax breaks. When Freeport LNG needed permission from the Department of Energy (DOE) to export gas to countries that don’t have free trade agreements with the United States, the company ghostwrote letters of support for local elected officials and organizations to submit to the federal department. Public records obtained by the Observer show that Freeport LNG’s public relations team gave a prewritten letter to Brazoria County Judge Matt Sebesta in 2021. Sebesta submitted the letter with minimal edits. Several other organizations and local elected officials also sent the same letter. Two years later, the DOE approved Freeport LNG’s request.

In downtown Freeport during my May visit, I took a walk with Manning Rollerson, who has lived in the city most of his life, growing up on the East End. He pointed out long-gone establishments from his youth, where shrimp boats used to dock, and the names of the historic buildings, empty but still standing.

We started at Freeport’s former city hall building, which was vacated last March. There was broken glass around the building, and its drive-through lanes, left over from when the building was a bank, were rotting away. As we continued walking, we saw that—save for a few offices, the Freeport City Museum, and some apartments—downtown was little more than a pass-through for people leaving the nearby port, where several industrial giants operate, including Phillips 66, Chiquita, and Freeport LNG.

“For all the money that is spent on [tax breaks], why is downtown looking like this? This is the heart of the city,” said Rollerson, who founded the Freeport Haven Project, a grassroots group advocating against pollution in Brazoria County, and has traveled all over the world advocating against LNG development and fossil fuels generally.

Rollerson said international leaders are often more receptive to his message than local officials are. “I’m gonna make it plain and simple: They don’t give a damn what we say when it comes to the industry.”

We approached the East End. Separated from downtown by Navigation Boulevard, this was a neighborhood, segregated by the city in the 1930s, where Black and brown people lived for decades. With most of those homes bought and demolished by Port Freeport, the land is being turned into storage lots as the port expands northwest toward downtown. Rollerson pointed to where his grandmother’s home had been, the park he used to go to as a kid, and the homes of family and friends. Now barren land, it will all be part of the port soon.

Rollerson is a plaintiff in a federal lawsuit alleging that the City of Freeport and Port Freeport violated the civil rights of East End property owners when it bought, some via eminent domain, and demolished homes in the neighborhood after purposefully disinvesting in the area. In 2022, the Department of Homeland Security’s Civil Rights Division agreed to review the lawsuit, but Lone Star Legal Aid, the lead attorneys in the suit, told the Observer that progress has since stalled after the Department of Government Efficiency laid off the DHS staff who were working on it.

“I don’t even see a future for nobody, based on our government,” Rollerson said. “If we don’t die from toxic poisoning, we’re gonna die from being broke and sick. When will we ever see the American dream?”

Brazoria County has rates of lung and bronchial cancer, which can be caused by particulate matter and benzene, above the national average. A little over 50,000 residents here don’t have health insurance.

As for downtown, Freeport Economic Development Corporation’s executive director Robert Johnson said most building owners are sitting on their properties in hopes that they can sell or lease them for more money in the future. He wants to avoid downtown being totally absorbed: “I would not want to see the downtown eaten up by the port, because they would just raze it,” Johnson said.

Despite his concern, Johnson said the city’s industry is a strength. The various companies here bring in a commuter population that dwarfs the number of local residents, which he said creates a spillover effect benefiting the local economy.

Port Freeport did not respond to the Observer’s questions for this story. Neither did Brazoria County or any Freeport city council member.

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When driving from Texas into Louisiana on State Highway 82, after Sabine Pass LNG’s massive trains, the road runs parallel to the coast, but you don’t see any water for half an hour. Instead, you see trees, cow pastures, and gas processing structures—some operating, some abandoned—before finally reaching the coastal prairie and its brown gulf water; the unincorporated community of Holly Beach, with its homes raised on pilings as high as 15 feet; and the surviving trees stripped of their foliage and gnarled from hurricanes. The few locals can watch LNG tankers from their porches pass into the Calcasieu Ship Channel, which spans from the coast all the way up to Lake Charles. In 1959, the first LNG exported from the United States left through this channel, sent to the United Kingdom as a test run for an industry that would concentrate here decades later.

At Holly Beach’s eastern edge are John Allaire and his 150-acre property. With a clear view from his mobile home’s porch, Allaire, a 69-year-old geologist who worked four decades as an environmental coordinator in the oil and gas industry, has been documenting just about everything related to Calcasieu Pass LNG, a 4-year-old, 432-acre facility owned by Virginia-based Venture Global that sits across the channel. When I met him in May, he spread maps, photos, and reports on a bench to show me the 4,700-person Cameron Parish now being surrounded by LNG facilities on every side but the coast. Starting with Sabine Pass LNG, which received the country’s first license after the Obama administration authorized LNG exports, it took just under a decade for three additional plants to emerge, with four more on the way.

He showed me a photo he took of a ship named Clean Energy in the channel with a stream of fire coming out of the plant’s flare stack. “That’s what clean energy looks like here on the Louisiana coast,” he said.

Within its first year of operating, in 2022, Allaire assessed that Calcasieu Pass LNG had violated its air permit more than 2,000 times by overemitting after accidents and equipment malfunctions. Alongside the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, a statewide environmental justice organization, Allaire found that more than half the time, in 2023, Venture Global was not reporting violations on time or at all. The state environmental regulator sent a compliance order to the company that same year, but nothing has come of it. In 2024, Allaire documented the plant flaring for 95 hours straight when it’s only permitted to do so for 60 hours annually.

Despite all this, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), which regulates LNG plant construction, green-lighted a second Venture Global facility farther into the unincorporated hamlet of Cameron last June. Four months later, the corporation successfully asked the state if it could increase its emissions at the first facility by up to 700,000 tons of greenhouse gasses and other pollutants.

Cameron Parish (named after a different Cameron than Cameron County, Texas, where Rio Grande LNG is being built) holds the distinction of having the fastest-shrinking population in Louisiana. But even with fewer locals to take jobs at the plants, Venture Global is now planning yet a third facility.

On Allaire’s side of the ship channel, Commonwealth LNG, developed by the Houston company Catarus, was set to start construction later this year. In October, Louisiana’s state court canceled the project’s construction permit; the court said state regulators did not consider how Commonwealth LNG—along with other established facilities in Cameron Parish—would affect coastal erosion and rising sea levels in Louisiana. But the state reissued the permit in mid-November. Commonwealth LNG did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment.

At its original Calcasieu Pass facility, Venture Global employs about 300 people, saying a majority of those employees come from Cameron or nearby parishes. In exchange, Cameron Parish and the state lavished the firm with billions in tax abatements.

Cameron Parish Port President Howard Romero said in 2023 that once the company starts paying property taxes, the parish would become the “Riviera of the world.” But the state renewed the first Venture plant’s tax abatements later that same year, meaning the company won’t pay property taxes—about $923 million in all—for another three years. The state also gave Venture Global a tax abatement for its second plant, letting the company off the hook for another $1.67 billion in property taxes, in a parish where the average annual income is $34,000.

On the main road into Cameron, I passed a mural that depicted a long-gone town—one that used to catch the most seafood in the country. Made in 1975, the artwork states that the town’s population was 2,510 people then. Census data says about 300 people live here now, but locals say it’s likely far fewer. There’s one gas station in town, with a food truck next door that serves po’boys and used to be a brick-and-mortar before Hurricane Laura in 2020 ripped it off its foundation. The remains of the restaurant now lie a block away in front of a church, also destroyed. Even the Catholic church won’t be rebuilding here, as insurers won’t fund this hurricane-prone place anymore. There are no hospitals or grocery stores.

The newest construction in town is the Lighthouse Bend restaurant, market, RV park, and marina, opened by Venture Global in 2024. The upscale establishment is juxtaposed against the LNG facilities just down the road from it and the storm-damaged homes, shrimp yards, and incessant dust that follows every truck. The parish and Venture Global built the marina after the latter had cut off public access to a parish-owned jetty park, which had a fishing pier and camper spaces along the ship channel (similar to Isla Blanca Park on South Padre Island). Mark Daigle, a Cameron Parish Police juror, told local media last year the project was turning Cameron into a place where displaced residents can return after hurricanes: “I truly believe [with] what we’ll be getting off LNG and everything like that, we will be able to put ourself in a place to where we can possibly help the people come back home.”

The local shrimping industry, a large part of the area’s culture, has all but disappeared since LNG arrived. Local shrimpers say they can’t catch anything when the ships pass through and drive the shrimp away. They also say constant dredging to deepen the ship channel worsens the problem; research suggests that this dredging kicks up sediment that harms sea life in a variety of ways. FERC acknowledged the same phenomenon in its final environmental impact statement on Venture Global’s second project but said that the effects could be mitigated.

Some locals say the tankers could help by coming later in the day, but companies won’t do that. Nowadays, Cameron Parish shrimpers drag nets 10 miles away in Vermillion Bay, where there is no tanker traffic. The difference between before and after the gas plants came is hundreds of thousands of dollars and pounds of shrimp.

The shrimpers who’ve stayed are now venturing into other businesses. Captain Anthony “Tad” Theriot, who quit school in 10th grade and has been shrimping ever since, spent the opening day of shrimp season at an oyster farm where he’s been working for extra income.

I met him that night on his boat, which is docked at the last shrimp house in town. He told me of life in Cameron back when there were grocery stores, a movie theater, even a skating rink. Hurricanes destroyed it all, and the LNG companies, despite their promises of prosperity, haven’t brought it back. Theriot put both his sons through college with shrimp money, but just last year, he tied up his boat for the season and had to get financial help from a local nonprofit.

“They got motherfuckers at Walmart making what I make,” Theriot said, adding that he’s ready to sell his boat and leave the industry. ”I can’t even make a living in my own house [where he would sell catches]. So what do I want to be here for?”

Another shrimper, Melissa Richard, who owns a shop in Hackberry, 30 miles north beside another LNG facility operated by a different company, echoed that she might leave the business that supported three generations of her family. “What else am I supposed to do? To me, I’ve made it to the top,” Richard told the Observer. “My dream was to have my own shrimp house. I’m living my dream, and it’s sinking.”

All this local change, according to companies like Venture Global, comes with a global benefit. The company believes that LNG reduces climate change by displacing coal plants. But, in recent years, coal has been primarily replaced by renewables like solar and wind rather than gas, even as the LNG industry continues expanding. Meanwhile, natural gas facilities, including Venture Global’s, frequently release massive quantities of methane—a powerful accelerant of climate change, the very phenomenon that intensifies the hurricanes that have ravaged this part of southwest Louisiana.

Venture Global did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Neither did Cameron Parish Police Jury President Ronald Nunez, or Police Juror Magnus McGee, whose district covers Cameron.

On the last day before I left the Louisiana coast, I met 72-year-old Sherry Peshoff, who lives near the planned location of Venture’s second LNG facility and on the same street where she was raised.

Peshoff can remember 1957’s Hurricane Audrey, which killed at least 500 people—more than live in the town of Cameron today. She remembers being inside a home with hundreds of others as it lifted off its foundation; she lost her paternal grandparents and uncle. Still, she grew up here shrimping with her siblings and dad. “He raised all four of us kids out of the Gulf,” she said. “The same gulf waters that took his family.”

From her raised porch, the existing Venture Global facility blocks most of the view, and the company is snatching up the properties that surround her. Leaving is becoming less a question of if than when. Once she’s gone, she expects the industry that helped drive her out to face a reckoning. “I have a gut feeling God has got something in store for this place. They’ve taken all the churches out. To me, that plant is causing a lot of trouble, and to me, the Lord’s going to let a big hurricane come and wipe this place out.”

Before leaving, I asked her what she’d tell residents of the Laguna Madre area in deep South Texas, which shares a waning shrimping industry and similar hurricane prone-ness.

“Cameron’s never going to be the same,” Peshoff said of her small patch of the Louisiana coast. “And you can bank on it: Your hometown’s not going to be the same neither.”

•

Back in Texas, Rio Grande LNG isn’t expected to export gas for another couple of years, but it’s already changing some aspects of life in Port Isabel, the coastal city where I grew up.

State Highway 48 has a new stoplight, directing trucks and heavy equipment from Rio Grande LNG’s site, piling up traffic in both directions in the morning and at quitting time. Data from the Texas Department of Transportation acquired by the Observer shows that more car accidents are happening near the site than before construction started, two years ago.

Long Island Village, a tiny golf-course community of mostly retirees, is connected to Port Isabel via a swing bridge. Dredge boats and vessels bringing material to the LNG site have regularly collided with that bridge, and one such incident snapped the cable.

In July, a shrimp boat sank in the channel, throwing two people onboard into the water. The captain was found dead a few days later. It was the first time a shrimper from the area had died on the water in years. Two local shrimpers told the Observer the boat hit a dredge pipe siphoning sediment to expand the channel for LNG. Spokespeople for the Port of Brownsville and the U.S. Coast Guard told the Observer they hadn’t heard of a dredge pipe being the cause. The Guard denied a Freedom of Information Act request, saying the investigation remains open. Great Lakes Dredging, the company expanding the channel, didn’t respond.

In town, Port Isabel residents are wondering what risks come with Rio Grande LNG being just 3 miles away. One resident, Marta Duran, lives off Port Road in what used to be Port Isabel’s Palangana neighborhood, a five-minute drive from the LNG site. At the end of her street is an abandoned oil refinery, cleared of structures and reclaimed by native flora over decades. Just a few miles away is Rio Grande LNG and, across the channel, Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch site. Duran worries one of SpaceX’s semi-frequent explosions could lead to a secondary explosion at the gas plant. (A consulting firm hired by NextDecade determined in 2017 that this was exceedingly unlikely, but that was based on smaller rockets than the ones Musk is using today.)