If you don’t live anywhere near an export terminal for liquified natural gas (LNG), you could still feel big impacts from the industry’s planned construction boom in the U.S. – and not just because the fossil fuel is rapidly worsening the climate crisis.

That’s according to a new study on LNG export authorizations by the Department of Energy (DOE), which finds that the average U.S. household will pay an additional $122.54 a year in utility bills if LNG export expansions go forward unchecked. Some households could see rates go up by over $360 a year.

The worst price inflation would be in the Southwest and along the Gulf Coast, the DOE study concludes – but the Great Plains, Rocky Mountains, and the Midwest are close behind, the report finds. The West Coast and the East also see significantly higher prices in the DOE’s analysis – meaning that prices would rise across the entire nation.

“These studies show clearly that LNG exports are in gas executives’ best interests and nobody else’s,” said Lauren Parker, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute. “Exporting fracked gas worsens climate change, harms wildlife, and raises prices for U.S. consumers.”

Under laws going back nearly 100 years, federal regulators are charged with deciding whether natural gas exports are in the public interest – a process that for years environmental advocates have viewed as too often a simple rubber stamp. The DOE’s new findings, however, could make it harder for federal regulators to simply greenlight projects – and watchdog groups can potentially sue if regulators don’t follow those laws.

“At its core, these public interest provisions are to protect domestic utility consumers,” Tyson Slocum, director of watchdog group Public Citizen’s Energy Program, said. “And what’s clear is that the massive expansion of LNG exports is coming at odds with the needs of domestic utility consumers.” 

“We have standing to challenge any arbitrary decision,” Slocum noted, referring to the legal right to sue in court.

‘Real World’ Effects of Rising Energy Prices

Already, the federal government has authorized shipping abroad almost half of the natural gas that’s tapped in the U.S., by methods including fracking, with the DOE finding that the authorizations issued already add up to 45 percent of current U.S. gas production.

“We have recently lived through the real-world ripple effects of increased energy prices domestically and globally since the pandemic,” Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said in a statement released December 17 along with the study. “Middle and low-income households already face energy bills that are too high. In parts of the South, the export-induced price increase would put some households over the energy burden threshold, further challenging their ability to meet basic needs.”

Natural gas prices are already notoriously volatile, tending to surge during crisis – as all too many Texas residents found out, for example, during Winter Storm Uri in 2021. Some utility customers in Oklahoma, for example, will be paying off the natural gas their utility companies bought during that crisis for 28 years to come, following an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision this summer.

The DOE now warns that price volatility could get far worse – and the new study’s estimates for higher utility prices don’t take price volatility into account. “The more volumes of U.S. LNG are exported, the greater the risk of this global price volatility being imported into our domestic market and impacting U.S. consumers and manufacturers,” Granholm said.

Globally, the U.S. burns more natural gas than any other country, the DOE study noted, with the U.S. consuming 23 percent of the world’s natural gas in 2022. Combined, Russia and China, the next two largest natural gas consumers, burned less than the U.S., taking up 12 percent and 9 percent respectively. Iran and Canada rounded out the top five consumers.

A flood of American LNG could disrupt the shift to renewable energy underway in other countries – making today’s climate crisis worse, the study suggests.

“While some tout LNG as a means to reduce the use of coal overseas (and to date that has been the case with some importing countries), the study put forward today shows a world in which additional U.S. LNG exports displace more renewables than coal globally,” Granholm said in her statement. “And in every scenario, increases in LNG exports would lead to increases in global net emissions – despite very aggressive assumptions in the model regarding deployment of carbon capture, utilization, and storage.”

The Export ‘Ban’ That Wasn’t

For the past year, the oil and gas industry and the politicians that back them have been up in arms over the DOE’s pause on LNG export terminal applications to reassess its economic and environmental analysis of the fossil fuel.

While the DOE’s pause effectively halted permitting for proposed new terminals, it never stopped LNG exports from terminals already in operation.

During 2024, seven LNG export terminals shipped a flood of natural gas abroad – and those terminals sent out record volumes, with total monthly LNG exports up slightly from the year before during the first nine months of 2024, federal data shows.

Nonetheless, many of Big Oil’s backers in Congress falsely claimed the Biden administration had fully banned the export of any LNG – despite the fact that exports not only continued, but rose while the permit pause was in effect.

“The DOE’s ban on LNG exports is the latest move by the radical left to accomplish their Green New Deal agenda, ignoring the economic and fiscal impacts which are felt by the American people,” a House Oversight subcommittee said in a press release earlier this month. Melodrama from members of Congress over DOE’s hold on issuing new permits hit soap-opera heights. “It’s chilling that the President didn’t even know, and wasn’t seemingly aware, of the impact of this pause,” Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) wrote.

“The administration tapped the brakes, and everyone’s been acting as if it’s been a four-car collision,” Clark Williams-Derry of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis told DeSmog.

In all likelihood, the DOE pause only affected perhaps three or four projects in the regulatory queue, says Williams-Derry, listing Venture Global’s Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2), Cheniere’s Corpus Christi Stage 4, and Energy Transfer Equity’s Lake Charles LNG as examples.

That rise in U.S. exports of LNG came despite falling demand for natural gas in Europe – which the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) expects will continue.

A day before the DOE study was released, Germany announced it will shutter its Wilhelmshaven LNG terminal, which imports most of its gas from the U.S., and which was pressed into service as Germany sought to avoid using Russian gas in the first quarter of 2025.

The new DOE study was met with a howl of outrage from natural gas trade associations.

“After nearly a year of a politically motivated pause that has only weakened global energy security, it’s never been clearer that U.S. LNG is critical for meeting growing demand for affordable, reliable energy while supporting our allies overseas,” Mile Sommers, CEO and President of the American Petroleum Institute said in a statement.

The API began publishing critiques of the DOE study and its potential methodology before the document was released.

“The report is one more in a long list of actions the Biden-Harris administration has taken to suppress American energy dominance,” American Energy Alliance (AEA) President Thomas Pyle told trade publication Rigzone.

The DOE’s study has a 60-day comment period – but it will be difficult for the incoming Trump administration to alter its findings, Slocum said.

“It is my firm understanding that this is going to be a final product,” Slocum said at a press conference before the study was released. “It absolutely complicates his ability to wave a magic wand.”