Federal regulators overseeing the Rio Grande LNG project outside of Port Isabel and Brownsville, Texas, are still failing to consider the operation’s anticipated air pollution and the resulting impact on public health, according to a new lawsuit.
Earthjustice, the Sierra Club, the City of Port Isabel, and the South Texas Environmental Justice Network sued the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) earlier this month for approving the Rio Grande LNG project.
The Laguna Madre area is the last region of the Texas coastline without an operating LNG plant. It has thereby avoided the pollution and environmental damage seen across the wider Gulf Coast from such facilities.
All of the operating LNG plants have violated the Clean Air Act at least once, as Deceleration has reported. Some have also violated the Clean Water Act. They often release emissions imperceptible to the human eye.
This is the third time FERC has approved the project, once again after being sued for not properly measuring how the project will impact nearby lower-income communities of color. The first lawsuit was filed in 2021.
The groups filed their lawsuit in the D.C. Circuit Court, the same court that canceled Rio Grande LNG’s FERC approval last year. The court at that time said that FERC’s environmental analysis was “deficient” under the National Environmental Policy Act.
That’s still the case, according to this new lawsuit, even after FERC completed a court-ordered supplemental environmental impact statement (SEIS) of the Rio Grande LNG project this summer. FERC approved the project again in August 2025.
“FERC has given its third attempt to reapprove the project, and they still haven’t fixed the problems the court identified the first time,” Nathan Matthews, senior attorney at Earthjustice and representing the groups and city in the lawsuit, told Deceleration.
Those problems, according to the lawsuit, include FERC not thoroughly investigating how Rio Grande LNG’s pollution would impact regional air quality and not incorporating Rio Grande LNG’s supposed carbon capture system into its analysis, despite the company saying it is still pursuing one.
What’s notable this time around is FERC’s claim that it is no longer obligated to consider how Rio Grande LNG could harm the low-income communities of color near it. Nearly all LNG facilities across the U.S. Gulf Coast are in communities with high poverty rates, according to U.S. Census data.
FERC cited the Trump administration’s executive orders to “unleash” the oil and gas industry and end “illegal discrimination” as its reason for not considering how nearby “environmental justice communities,” or lower-income communities of color, would be harmed by the project.
In approving the project for a third time, FERC said the project’s economic benefits outweigh the negatives, the latter of which, according to the regulator, include people being able to see the facility and an increase in particulate matter drifting into a nearby wildlife refuge.
What FERC didn’t include, as noted in the lawsuit, was Rio Grande LNG growing from a 5-train to a 6-train facility, possibly even larger. (An LNG “train” is a liquefaction unit that produces LNG. The sixth proposed Rio Grande train, for which NextDecades anticipates requesting a permit in 2026, would increase production by 6 million tons of LNG per year—allowing for a total of 426 LNG tanker visits to the site per year.)
FERC says that the Rio Grande LNG project complies with the Clean Air Act. But that doesn’t mean that operations will stay within the limits of its state-issued air permit or federal standards.
As Deceleration wrote last month, the Environmental Integrity Project recently used regulator data to show how every operating LNG facility in the U.S. has violated its air permit at least once; one Louisiana facility did so thousands of times in a year. Optical gas imaging cameras have shown facilities emit from more than just their flare stacks.
“Even if the terminal doesn’t violate any of the Clean Air Act standards, said Earthjustice’s Mathews, “it’s still going to be a lot more pollution in the surrounding communities, and that’s going to cause harm to those communities, regardless of whether we look at who those communities are.”
Matthews said the groups have not decided whether they will pursue an order to stop construction at the site. A similar request last year was denied by the court. Though it could be months before the federal court takes up the new lawsuit, Matthews said. Last year’s court ruling came a little more than a year after the groups appealed FERC’s second approval.
NextDecade did not respond to a request for comment.
The groups’ lawsuit also names the Rio Bravo Pipeline, a portion of which runs through or near land owned by the Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas.
“Once again, the FERC is not doing a full environmental review nor consultation with our Tribe, doing everything they can to give the LNG companies anything they want at the expense of our Tribe and our people,” Tribal Chairman Juan Mancias said in a press release.
NextDecade also has a storage site near the tribe’s land just outside of Brownsville, much of it filled with pipeline segments and construction machinery.
Similarly, Commonwealth LNG in Hackberry, Louisiana, which is owned by a Houston-based company, had their state-level authorization revoked by a local court in October for failing to consider its environmental justice impacts. But last month the state issued another permit, saying that “the benefits of this project outweigh the costs to the community.”
NextDecade says it expects to ship out its first gas cargoes from its three-train facility by 2027. The project is already affecting traffic on Highway 48. Locals complain of fast drivers and congestion.
The City of Port Isabel has vocally opposed LNG projects since the companies started scoping out the area more than a decade ago, with resolutions against their development and against granting them tax abatements.
Port Isabel’s City Manager, Jared Hockema, who has been with the city since it started opposing LNG development, says delaying the project has been worth it.
“That’s a generation of kids that grew up without air pollution because of those efforts. And that’s certainly worthwhile,” Hockema told Deceleration. “And what it reminds us of is that in life, there’s always struggle and progress is not permanent. You have to fight to keep it.”
