New LNG Bill Blocks Courts from Canceling Permits—Even with Environmental Flaws

The “Protect LNG Act of 2025” is straightforward: it’s designed to speed up and secure the approval process for massive liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities. The bill focuses on two main areas: insulating existing permits from legal challenges and tightening the rules for filing new lawsuits against future projects. Essentially, it’s a policy move that prioritizes the stability and continuity of the U.S. natural gas export industry over the traditional power of courts to halt projects due to environmental review errors.

The 'Remand, Not Revoke' Rule for Existing Permits

Section 3 of this Act is the biggest game-changer for projects already underway. Right now, if an environmental group or a local community sues the government over an LNG facility and proves that the environmental review—done under laws like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA)—was flawed, a court can often invalidate the facility’s permit. This bill strips that power away. If a court finds an environmental review violation, it cannot cancel the permit, license, or approval. Instead, the court must send the issue back (remand it) to the federal agency responsible (like FERC or the Maritime Administration) and tell them to fix the specific violation.

Think of it like this: If you find out your contractor built your new garage without the proper permits, normally the city can issue a stop-work order or make you tear it down. Under this bill, the court can only tell the contractor to go back and get the paperwork right, while you get to keep using the garage in the meantime. For communities living near these facilities—who are often concerned about air quality, noise, and safety—this means a project with a proven environmental flaw can continue operating while the agency takes its time to correct the paperwork. The bill also explicitly requires agencies to keep processing other pending LNG applications, regardless of these ongoing legal fixes.

Tightening the Legal Window

Section 4 deals with how future challenges to these facilities will be handled, and it significantly narrows the playing field for opponents. First, it centralizes all legal challenges to a single venue: the U.S. Court of Appeals that covers the geographic area where the facility is, or will be, located. If you live across the country but are concerned about the global climate impact of a Texas-based facility, you now have to sue in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. This is a clear move to make litigation less accessible and more expensive for distant plaintiffs.

Second, and even more critically, the bill imposes a strict 90-day deadline for filing a lawsuit after the federal agency publishes its final approval notice in the Federal Register. Miss that 90-day window, and you’re generally barred from challenging the permit. This is a very tight turnaround for community groups, who often need time to raise funds, hire legal counsel, and fully digest complex environmental impact statements that can run thousands of pages long. It pressures opponents to act extremely quickly or lose their chance at judicial review entirely.

The Real-World Trade-Off

For the LNG industry, this bill offers tremendous regulatory certainty, which translates directly into lower risk and easier financing for multi-billion-dollar projects. The benefit is clear: projects are less likely to be derailed by litigation, ensuring a steady supply of gas exports.

However, for the public interest, the trade-off is a significant reduction in judicial oversight. The court’s role shifts from being a check on potentially harmful projects to being a procedural referee, simply telling the agency to correct its homework. By limiting the court’s remedy to remand and imposing a short statute of limitations, the Act makes it much harder for citizens to successfully challenge projects that might have been approved based on inadequate or flawed environmental analysis. It essentially sets up a fast lane for LNG exports while creating significant roadblocks for those who seek to ensure these massive facilities comply with existing environmental laws.