‘This used to be a beautiful place’: how the US became the world’s biggest fossil fuel state

Photograph: John Allaire at the site of a proposed liquified natural gas plant, with another plant in the background.

To witness how the United States has become the world’s unchallenged oil and gas behemoth is to contemplate the scene from John Allaire’s home, situated on a small spit of coastal land on the fraying, pancake-flat western flank of Louisiana.

Allaire’s looming neighbor, barely a mile east across a ship channel that has been pushed into the Gulf of Mexico, is a hulking liquified natural gas (or LNG) plant, served by leviathan ships shuttling its chilled cargo overseas. Another such terminal lies a few miles to the west, yet another to the north. The theme continues even in Allaire’s seaward vista – alongside a boneyard of old oil rigs, a new floating offshore LNG platform is in the works.

“I’m pretty much surrounded,” said Allaire, a retired oil industry engineer who has a trailer, a couple of friendly dogs, and a patch of marshland and beach in Cameron parish. Yet another gas export plant is planned just a few hundred yards from Allaire’s property, while his existing imposing neighbor, which Allaire compares to Las Vegas due to its incandescent flaring of gas into the night’s sky, is on track to expand to become one of the largest such facilities in the world.

“We don’t really have a Gulf coast in the US,” said Allaire. “We have the east coast, the west coast and the carbon coast. This is simply a sacrifice zone for the oil and gas industry.”

The rise of the US as the world’s oil and gas powerhouse has come at an astonishing pace. Within just the last decade, Congress lifted a ban on exporting crude oil and the US became one of the world’s leading oil exporters, elbowing aside classic petrostates like the UAE and Kuwait. In that timeframe, US exports of gas, frozen to liquid form and shipped, also started in earnest and last year America became the world’s leader.

“To go from zero to billions of barrels is just stunning,” said David Dismukes, an energy expert at Louisiana State University. “It can be hard to comprehend.”

Domestic oil and gas production, turbocharged by the advance of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has rocketed. No country in history has extracted as much oil as the US has in each of the past six years, with a fifth of all oil drilled in 2023 being American flavored. US gas production also tops the global charts, having surged 50% in the past decade. Every hour of every day, on average, around 1m barrels of oil and 2m tons of gas are sucked up from oil and gas fields from Texas to Appalachia to Alaska.

The US’s hydrocarbon dominance, coming as experts have warned there can be no new fossil fuel projects if the world is to avoid climate breakdown, challenges conventional assumptions about what makes a “petrostate”. While the vast, diverse US economy doesn’t hinge upon oil and gas like Libya’s and Kuwait’s economies do, some regions have become hooked on industry incomes, research shows.

“The US has become a petrostate and is still, even under President Biden, permitting new drilling,” said John Sterman, a climate policy expert at MIT.

Nationally, though, it’s been a mostly unheralded ascension. “I bet if you asked 10 people in the US which country was the world’s biggest oil producer, most would say Saudi Arabia,” said Dismukes. “That narrative is so imprinted now. I’m not sure many would even mention the US.”

Yet it is wealthy countries such as the US that have spearheaded oil and gas expansions in recent years even as they vowed to restrain dangerous global heating, data shared with the Guardian has shown. Without the US, global gas production would have actually declined over the past two years.

“The United States can’t preach temperance from a barstool,” said Ed Markey, the Democratic senator and proponent of the Green New Deal. “We can’t tell other countries to reduce greenhouse gases as we export oil and gas to them.

“When the crude oil export ban was lifted, over my opposition, the US prioritized big oil over the planet. Everything I warned in 2015 has come true and it will only get worse as the years go by and oil companies rush fossil fuels to the highest bidders.”

That such a boom has occurred during Joe Biden’s presidency is not only inconvenient for Biden, who has called the climate crisis an “existential threat” and offered a now-broken promise of “no more drilling on federal lands, period”, but also Donald Trump, who has pledged to “drill, baby, drill” if he returns to the White House and has lambasted Biden, falsely, for supposedly shutting down US energy production.

It’s therefore not politically expedient for either Democrats or Republicans to fully extol how the US has become the world’s leading oil and gas dealer, even as processing plants, pipelines and shipping terminals are unfurled at a galloping pace along the Gulf coast. US gas export capacity has tripled since 2018 and will double again in the next three years, with a pause placed by Biden on new gas export licenses tossed aside by a Trump-appointed judge this month.

The center of this frenzy of activity is a slice of the Gulf coast barely 50 miles (80km) long on either side of the Louisiana and Texas border. This small stretch, rapidly chewed away by some of the fastest rising seas in the world, has 11 LNG plants at various stages of operation and construction that, at capacity, will export more gas than Australia and Qatar, the next two largest LNG exporters after the US, combined.

Heralded by the gas industry and even the Biden administration as a way to bolster European allies roiled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or to help wean Asian countries off dirtier coal, LNG has its own, huge, climate cost. Drilling, transporting, cooling, shipping and then ultimately burning this gas expels so much methane, a potent greenhouse gas, that the planet-heating emissions of all 18 current and proposed US export projects could equal the entire current carbon pollution of Europe.

Venture Global, an oil and gas operator, is at the vanguard, welcomed by the state with tax breaks and responsible for the Calcasieu Pass facility near Allaire’s property in Cameron, which started operation in 2022 but, according to green groups, already has more than 2,000 violations of its air quality permits through the release of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and other pollutants.

A planned $10bn extension, called Calcasieu Pass 2, or CP2, would shift about 20m tons of LNG at capacity, single-handedly boosting US gas exports by a fifth and causing planet-heating pollution equal to 46 coal-fired power plants. Venture Global has hired two lobbying firms, one headed by former Biden aide Chris Putala, to tout the jobs and investment flowing from the project, but this has not stemmed a furious backlash from environmental groups that have labeled it “climate vandalism”.

There are fears of mounting localized impacts, too, with poorer communities and people of color long bearing the brunt of industrial pollution along the Gulf coast. “Approving CP2 would be signing our death certificate,” said Roishetta Ozane, head of an environmental justice organization in nearby Lake Charles. “Our air smells like rotten eggs, our water is polluted, our children are sick, our family members are dying of cancer. We can’t take any more – enough is enough.”

Ozane’s family has twice been displaced by hurricanes, which are being made fiercer by rising global temperatures. Others here, too, have suffered anguish from both the climate crisis and its cause – Travis Dardar, a shrimper, had to flee his home in low-lying Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana, because sea level rise was swamping it, only to end up trying to ply the fisheries off Cameron, a place that became a global LNG industry hotspot.

“This used to be a beautiful place, but all the docks are now gone, the shrimp and crab have been poisoned and killed by all the dredging,” Dardar said. “What sustained us for generations has gone; it’s like an alien invasion. CP2 will be the nail in the coffin, it will finish everything off. But we are going to keep fighting it.”

Dardar, Ozane and Allaire are part of a loose-knit coalition trying to halt the stampede of gas, with Allaire acting as a sort of frontline general, his trailer festooned with maps, photos and documents of the industry’s ills, a truck with a sticker reading “Stop LNG!” sitting outside. This coalition has traveled to protests in New York City and Washington DC, filed complaints, implored the Biden administration to do more. The actor Jane Fonda – “a hugger”, according to Allaire – has visited in support.

“I’ve been a huge pain in the backside for them,” said Allaire of Venture Global and Commonwealth, the company that wants to build the latest gas plant next door. He estimates his complaints have cost the developer millions of dollars to remedy the dumping of sludgy waste and to preserve local sand dunes.

Still, the weight of power firmly remains with the industry. In June, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which has never denied a permit to a major gas project, approved CP2, despite one of the body’s three commissioners objecting that it will cause “particularly disturbing” levels of air pollution to the surrounding community. CP2 will go ahead should it get an export license, and Trump has said, if elected, he will provide a rubber stamp “on day one”.

Just a few hundred people remain in the town of Cameron itself, a once bustling community of several thousand that was ravaged by a parade of hurricanes, most recently Hurricane Laura in 2020.

There’s little evidence this is a region with billions of dollars of investment gushing into it, with a single food truck serving a desolate town center of tumbledown homes. Some local parks and fishing spots have been swallowed up by the gas industry. Nearby, a couple of steel-hulled boats, swept far ashore like toys by Hurricane Rita in 2005, lie rusting in the sun.

It’s uncertain that all of the proposed new plants will go ahead, locking in decades of further fossil fuel use, but that’s mostly because the markets are already shifting – Europe needs less gas than was previously thought and there’s evidence that even a global glut of gas won’t displace much coal in China.

“If the projects are left stranded because the world changes – well, that happens, much like what happened with the whaling industry,” said Dismukes. “But if you kill these projects, what happens then? You have people working for six-figure salaries in the industry – who else will pay them that, Uber?

“It’s not like Microsoft and Dell are going to suddenly come in. There is no new thing, there is no plan in Louisiana. That’s the sad thing.”

A spokesperson for Venture Global said the company had confidence “in the ultimate demand for US LNG, including our CP2 project, which is already contracted to supply countries like Germany, Japan and Ukraine and strengthen energy security”.

“The few highly paid activists who oppose economic development and job creation in Louisiana are bankrolled by the environmental lobby and their Sierra Club-backed shell organizations are not representative of the local community,” the spokesperson said, adding that Venture Global followed all environmental regulations and had invested in Cameron via a training program and a new development that includes a market, marina and RV park.

If you can ignore the gargantuan gas storage tanks nearby, Allaire’s small patch of beach is bucolic. It sits amid marshland that is a riot of wildlife, with Allaire often breaking off to point out a brown pelican, or a snowy egret, or to talk about seeing some turtles the other night.

This small haven is shrinking, however. Allaire estimates he has lost about 30 or 40 acres of the property since buying it in 1989, eroded away by the relentless rising seas. Stalks of tall grass and withered trees poke up from the surf offshore – remarkably, they were on solid land just six months ago.

Should Commonwealth build its LNG plant next door, complete with a towering wall to keep the Gulf at bay just long enough to make a few billion dollars, Allaire said he will concede defeat and move. Until then, he hopes to at least slow things down a bit.

“Once it’s all over, these LNG guys will just walk away and what will be left behind?” he said. “We’re left with a mess, the area permanently destroyed. It’s all bullshit, if you ask me.”