Refreshing Honesty From LNG Exec: "Let's Plant A Few Trees And Call That An Offset, That Was All Bullshit"
Several Gulf Coast LNG and utility executives dismissed the importance of sustainability for LNG projects at the Reuters Energy LIVE 2025 conference in Houston, Texas, last week. “So, at the end of the day, all the sustainability stuff, I’m not going to belittle it too much,” Vivek Chandra, CEO of Gulfstream LNG told attendees. “I’ll belittle it a little bit, let’s be clear.” “That cleaner LNG phase that was there a couple years ago, ‘let’s plant a few trees and call that an offset,’ that was all bullshit,” Chandra said. “We know it and everybody knows it. And I think we look bad for it, at the end of the day.”
“Now obviously if we can somehow integrate carbon storage and get some tax credit from the U.S. government, why wouldn’t we?” Chandra continued.
ED. - Too bad the penny hasn't dropped for him regarding "carbon storage". Oh well.
Chandra’s Gulfstream is advancing a project in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, just south of New Orleans that would export roughly 4 million tons per year of liquefied natural gas. While Chandra mocked sustainability, it has real impacts for the people who live near these gas terminals, which emit enormous amounts of pollution. “The Gulfstream LNG project is another heavy weight on an already strained Gulf coast,” Roishetta Sibley Ozane, the founder of the Vessel Project of Louisiana, told DeSmog. “Our area has endured enough environmental stress, and the idea of introducing more potential pollution is deeply concerning. The coast, with its fragile ecosystems, is already suffering from the impacts of industrialization and climate change.”
EDIT
Gulfstream LNG wasn’t the only company to offer its views on sustainability at the conference during a panel called Accelerating LNG Growth Across the Americas. “Our fundamental planning principles are affordability, reliability, and then sustainability —and there’s a reason that’s the order, right?” Eliecer Viamontes, CEO of Entergy Texas, said. Entergy Texas, part of utility giant Entergy, provides electrical power to over a half-million customers in what Viamontes described as “one of the largest industrial corridors in the world.” The company’s territory includes Port Arthur, where Sempra and ConocoPhillips are currently building a major LNG project, and parent company Entergy recently struck deals to power data centers for both Meta and Google, Viamontes noted.
EDIT
https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/18/gulfstream-lng-ceo-says-carbon-offsets-cleaner-lng-are-bullshit/