The Biden administration's Energy Department released results of a study that could hamper President-elect Donald Trump's plans to promote liquefied natural gas (LNG).
The report, titled "Energy, Economic, and Environmental Assessment of U.S. LNG Exports," includes analysis of the dangers that LNG exports pose to the environment and the economy.
The analysis could make it harder for the incoming Trump administration to expand U.S. natural gas exports by issuing permits for billions of dollars' worth of facilities.
Environmental groups said they will use the report to bolster legal challenges to any new project Trump's administration approves, Politico reported.
The incoming administration "clearly wants to take a different approach and start approving permits as fast as they can. But the study's findings could complicate that approach," said Ben Cahill, an energy scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, The Washington Post reported.
The Energy Department's report stopped short of recommending the U.S. cap exports, Politico reported.
However, it recommended that regulators examine whether soaring gas permits are benefiting or imperiling the national interest.
LNG is a form of natural gas that has been cooled to a liquid state, allowing it to be easily stored or shipped.
The report warned that plans to increase U.S. natural gas exports risk driving domestic energy prices higher and said that allowing further LNG exports would cause an additional 1.5 gigatons of planet-warming greenhouse gases — equivalent to about a quarter of the country's total annual emissions — to enter the atmosphere by 2050.
"Communities that are living in the shadows of LNG export projects already live among significant industrial development and would be subject to even higher levels of methane" and other harmful pollution, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Tuesday during a call with reporters, the Post reported.
"Those are the facts, and the final decision, of course, is now in the hands of the next administration. We hope that they'll take these facts into account to determine whether additional LNG exports are truly in the best interest of the American people."
In January, the Biden administration halted the approval of LNG export projects while studying their effects on climate change, the economy, and national security.
Trump, who says the pause has stifled investments and jobs in the domestic gas industry, has promised to end it on his "very first day back" in the White House.