(Originally published by Canary Media on January 30, 2023) 

Special report: Rival U.S. firms lob differing, and debatable, climate claims as they market ​“green” liquefied natural gas, or LNG, to a warming world.

This is part one of an in-depth reporting project.

By night, the industrial operation sprawling across the marshland of Louisiana’s southwest tip seems otherworldly. The 1.6-square-mile complex of tubes, tanks and machinery emits a dull hiss, and its thousands of yellowish lights and three flame-topped flare towers cast an eerie glow. By day, when the facility is easier to discern, so is its earthly purpose. Natural gas piped from fields across the United States whooshes into the plant, where six 1,200-foot-long lines of engines, fans and compressors cool the gas into ​“liquefied natural gas,” or LNG. The frigid fossil fuel then shoots out of the complex and into gargantuan oceangoing tankers, each roughly as long as three football fields, waiting at the facility’s dock on a channel that feeds the Gulf of Mexico.

(Continue reading the opinion essay on Canary Media’s page here.)