This week organizers from Freeport, Texas, traveled to Tokyo to file formal complaints against the country’s banks funding an LNG export facility in their community—one of nine operating liquified natural gas (LNG) export facilities is located, were in Tokyo, Japan,
More than $3.85 billion flowed to Freeport LNG in recent years from Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC) and Nippon Export and Investment Insurance (NEXI), both state-run financial institutions, and several private banks. They helped launch Freeport’s LNG export operations, which began in December 2019. Japan’s state-run power company, JERA, owns a fifth of the plant and also buys its gas.
The Freeport area-based organizers Melanie Oldham, Manning Rollerson, and Gwendolyn Jones, via their complaints, ask the banks and companies to stop supporting Freeport LNG. The organizers filed the complaints via email to the Japan Center for Engagement and Remedy on Business and Human Rights, or JaCER, which acts as a non-judicial intermediary between companies and people alleging abuses.
“We have a very poor town, poor infrastructure, a lot of problems, so if Japanese financiers of Freeport LNG really care about human rights at all, we're telling them to take our complaint seriously, answer it, answer our questions, our demands,” Oldham, the founder and director of Better Brazoria, said during a press conference in Tokyo on May 19.
The organizers are demanding Japan Bank for International Cooperation allow JaCER to investigate whether Freeport LNG aligns with the bank’s own investment guidelines on how its projects consider environmental and human rights. Freeport LNG has had several operational issues over the years, including an explosion, and the facility regularly violates its state-issued air permit. It has much political and cultural sway in Brazoria County and is expanding, despite all of its issues.
Some of the same banks that directly invested in Freeport LNG, like Mitsubishi UFJ (MUFG), Mizuho, and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation (SMBC), have collectively spent at least $38 billion on U.S. LNG projects as of April 2025, according to an analysis by the Sierra Club cited by Oil Change International, which arranged the organizers’ trip to Japan.
Japan’s energy plans are wedded to the U.S. continuing to pour billions into fossil fuels. Japan has $36 billion earmarked for oil, gas, and mineral projects in the U.S. as part of a trade deal between the countries, including a massive oil export terminal 30 miles from Freeport, which started construction this month. Japan has doubled-down on its investment in natural gas, considered both an affront to China aligned with its goal of becoming a global fossil fuel superpower.
This is the first time that U.S. residents have filed complaints with JaCER, according to Oil Change International, but not the first time one has been filed against a bank for funding an LNG project. Rainforest Action Network’s Japan team filed a complaint against MUFG for its investment in the Rio Grande LNG project outside of Port Isabel, Texas, in September 2024. The group said MUFG, by investing in the LNG project, was risking the “infringing on the rights of Native American tribes,” specifically the Carrizo Comecrudo Tribe of Texas, whose sacred lands are where Rio Grande LNG is, according to the tribe’s chair, Juan Mancias.
On a livestreamed call from Tokyo, Manning Rollerson passed along this message to a staffer with the office of U.S. Congressmember Randy Weber, R-Beaumont:
"So you tell Randy [Weber] for me that every energy policy he has with a foreign government ... that it's my mission as a father, a grandfather, a husband, to make sure that the governments know that they will be held accountable just like the industries."
Rainforest Action Network Japan representatives told me, when I was reporting on MUFG’s investment in the Rio Grande LNG project for Cronkite News, that their complaint was never addressed. It still hasn’t been. But JaCER told me they couldn’t disclose anything about their investigation.
Rollerson, who is the founder of the Freeport Haven Project, first went to Tokyo in January 2025, telling the Japanese Parliament, or Diet, that it had made a deal with the devil (ie. Trump) by investing in U.S. oil and gas. He said that Japan still hasn’t addressed the concerns he has about Freeport LNG.
“Why do I have to keep coming back to this country to ask the government and investors to do due diligence, to make sure the human aspect is part of the equation,” Rollerson said at the Tuesday press conference. “When you have somebody that you invest in, you have to take responsibility to what you invest in, to show good business and good leadership.”
JaCER acknowledged receiving Deceleration’s request for comment but did not respond to our questions.
