By Steven Mufson, The Washington Post
PLAQUEMINES PARISH, La. — The marshes that blanket this pancake-flat parish south of New Orleans stretch for miles, strewn with small streams that flow into the Gulf of Mexico. A lone four-lane road goes south past a Navy air base, an idle industrial site, a coal export terminal and a handful of small storm-battered communities.
Then, suddenly, a gigantic facility rises from the wetlands. Cranes dot the skyline. They hover over crews that are installing a jumble of pipes, pumps, storage tanks and two 720-megawatt power plants — equipment needed to freeze natural gas into a liquid form so it can be shipped around the world.
It might seem like a risky location for a $21 billion liquefied natural gas plant, given this region’s ferocious hurricanes and sea levels that are rising faster than almost anywhere else on the planet. But the company building this plant, Arlington, Va.-based Venture Global, says it has an answer to these threats: a 26-foot-high steel sea wall that surrounds the 632-acre site, twice the size of Washington’s National Mall.
The fortress highlights a crucial tension for this region of the country. The sea is rising here and the land is rapidly sinking, in large part driven by decades of oil and gas drilling and the planet-warming emissions that come from the burning of those fossil fuels. That is accelerating the destruction of wetlands, which serve as a critical barrier, and speeding up flooding across the coast, often with less advantaged communities most vulnerable.
