A major Louisiana utility company wants to build a floating methane gas-fired power plant to supply electricity to oil and gas infrastructure. Entergy Louisiana says it is necessary to make those operations more resilient to extreme weather like hurricanes because land in the area is disappearing from a combination of subsidence and sea-level rise, Floodlight Reports. Climate change, mainly caused by the extraction and combustion of fossil fuels like oil and gas, is causing sea levels to rise and making extreme hurricanes more frequent.
“It’s very clear that we are in a loop of irony at this point where the hotter it gets, the more water there is, and the less land there is as a result of oil and gas extraction, all while Louisiana is so interconnected to those international oil and gas systems,” Logan Atkinson Burke, executive director of the Alliance for Affordable Energy, told Floodlight.
The plan is reminiscent of Entergy Louisiana’s sister firm Entergy New Orleans, which built a methane-gas fired power plant in Eastern New Orleans to provide power after major hurricanes. That plant was built in 2020 over the objections of local residents calling for distributed renewable energy. The next year, that plant failed to prevent dangerous weeks-long (and longer) power outages after Hurricane Ida. (Floodlight)