An environmental group is suing a regional regulator over its recent extension of a construction permit for a terminal to export liquefied natural gas from a town in southern New Jersey. The agency’s action marks a new turn in a multi-year battle over plans to build what would be the state’s first such plant.
Delaware Riverkeeper Network says the Delaware River Basin Commission broke its own rules in September when it gave the terminal developer another five years to build the project, known as Dock 2, on the Delaware River at Gibbstown, New Jersey, near Philadelphia. The extension was the second by the agency in three years.
The developer, Delaware River Partners (DRP), is an affiliate of New Fortress Energy, an investment firm that supports LNG development. Neither company responded to requests for comment on the suit or their plans for the LNG terminal.
The plaintiff says the the commission, DRBC, violated a “comprehensive plan”—by which the agency has operated since it was set up in 1961—when it determined that the developer had not materially changed its plans to export LNG from Gibbstown since first applying for the dredging and construction permit in 2019, and was therefore entitled to the extension.
“The condition of the project has not changed in a manner important to determining whether the project would substantially impair or conflict with the commission’s comprehensive plan,” the commission said in a Sept. 10 resolution.
But Delaware Riverkeeper Network said the agency had no legal right to extend the permit again after first doing so in 2022.
“It is clear that this LNG project should not have been given yet another lifeline by the DRBC that leaves our communities under its continuing threats of harm, requiring that the Delaware Riverkeeper Network has no choice but to file this lawsuit in defense,” said Maya van Rossum, leader of the group, in a statement after it filed the suit in federal court in New Jersey on Oct. 10.
The terminal plan has been strongly opposed by environmental and civic groups in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. LNG would be transported through both Pennsylvania and New Jersey before being loaded onto ships for export. Critics argue that the shipment of the explosive fuel represents a danger to the public who live along an approximately 200-mile route between a planned liquefaction plant at Wyalusing in northeast Pennsylvania, where natural gas would be super-cooled into a liquid for shipment to the export terminal in Gibbstown.
The shipments would also further increase the production of natural gas from Pennsylvania’s gas-rich Marcellus Shale, critics say, adding to global carbon emissions at a time when climate change is already killing people and destroying communities.
The developer first planned to transport the fuel by truck or train, but a longstanding national ban on the shipment of LNG by rail was reinstated by the federal government under former President Joe Biden in 2023 after being lifted by the first Trump administration three years earlier. DRP now plans to use only trucks.
The Delaware Riverkeeper Network says the DRBC does not have the authority to grant another permit extension until June 2030. Even if the commission could legally grant another extension, the developer is no longer allowed to ship LNG by rail, the riverkeeper says. The group also says that the Gibbstown site now includes underground caverns where some 27 million gallons of propane and butane would be stored, if finally approved by New Jersey regulators. Both factors represent “substantial” changes from the original proposal, which violate the DRBC rules, the plaintiff argues.
The Delaware Riverkeeper Network also contends that the developer has not been “diligently” pursuing the project, as required, and has explained its continued failure to build the terminal by referring only to “market conditions and other factors.”
The developer’s initial plan to build a liquefaction plant appears to have been dropped in favor of an energy center on the site, according to Tracy Carluccio of Delaware Riverkeeper Network. But she said the latest permit extension indicates that DRP still plans to build the terminal despite the long delay and continuing opposition from activist groups.
Kate Schmidt, a spokeswoman for the DRBC, which oversees Delaware River water supply and quality, said it does not comment on matters in litigation. But the resolution shows that the DRBC’s commissioners—the governors of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Delaware, or their representatives—determined unanimously at their September meeting that there were no material changes to the project from the time it was first applied for, and that the developer has “diligently” pursued the project.
The commissioners said underground caverns cited by the plaintiffs are unrelated to the construction and dredging for the dock, and so don’t represent a substantial change in the project.
Construction could now take place between Sept. 15 and March 15, outside the period when federal rules set by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers ban building in the river to protect the critically endangered Atlantic sturgeon, only about 250 of which are thought to survive.
Across the Delaware River in Chester, Pennsylvania, expectations rose that another LNG export terminal is in the cards when the state’s new Republican U.S. senator, Dave McCormick, wrote in a Washington Times op-ed in April that a $7 billion terminal was being planned near Chester by developer Penn America Energy and a union alliance.
On Nov. 5, the Pennsylvania House Committee on Environmental and Natural Resource Protection has scheduled a public hearing in Chester to inform residents about the company’s plans.
If built, the New Jersey and Pennsylvania terminals would add to other U.S. LNG export sites that are mostly on the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas. President Donald Trump has urged an increase in LNG exports as part of his administration’s aggressive advocacy of fossil fuels.
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