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Sherry Peshoff can see the steel wall from her front door. Her home is lifted 12 feet off the ground to protect it from stormwaters that surge in off the Gulf, but it’s not as high as the wall.

Rust red and corrugated, the 31.5-foot-high solid steel fence circumscribes a natural gas export terminal that sprawls across 4.5 square kilometres where grasslands stood just a year ago. The wall is meant to hold back the type of storm surges that pushed through here when Hurricane Rita hit in 2005, followed by Ike in 2008 and Laura and Delta in 2020.

Before the storms, Cameron was home to some 2,000 people. Today, fewer than 200 remain. In their place, a company called Venture Global is building a complex of liquefied natural gas terminals that will be one of the largest in the United States. The industrial operations cluster together gas-fired turbines and compressors to super-cool methane gas until it becomes a liquid, which is then pumped into tankers and shipped across the ocean.

Liquefied natural gas, or LNG, is one of the oil and gas industry’s most lucrative wins. Over a decade, the U.S. went from nothing to become the world’s largest exporter, and output is expected to nearly double between now and 2029. The growth defied the Biden administration’s goal of reining in climate pollution and has been super-charged by the Trump administration’s pro-fossil-fuel agenda.

No LNG exporter is growing faster than Venture Global. Started by a former investment banker and a Washington lawyer, the company was built in the mold of its founders.

“Ultimately our business is that we manufacture and operate machines that produce money,” the company’s chief executive, Michael Sabel, told CNBC on the day he took his company public last year.

Sabel and his co-founder Robert Pender set out to build LNG terminals faster and cheaper than their competitors. They borrowed big, built fast and today they are making money like never before, buoyed by the Trump administration’s permissive oversight and its war in Iran that has sent global natural gas prices surging. “Unstoppable energy” is the company’s new tagline.

Venture Global’s growth has made Sabel and Pender enormously wealthy, with compensation last year of more than $39 million and $12 million respectively, and net worths in the billions—the pair own nearly 80% of the company’s stock. Since the United States started bombing Iran, several other company insiders have collectively netted more than $246 million by selling Venture Global stock, the price of which spiked during the war, according to an analysis by the advocacy group Friends of the Earth and confirmed by Inside Climate News.

“It’s hard to think of a company that has more effectively turned international turmoil into money and expansion than Venture Global,” said Lukas Shankar-Ross, deputy director of the climate and energy justice program at Friends of the Earth, who performed the analysis.

Like many success stories, Venture Global’s has come at others’ expense. In its first year of operation, the company’s Calcasieu Pass terminal, or CP1, which looms over what’s left of Cameron, spewed hundreds of thousands of pounds of methane, carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds and other hazardous pollutants into the air, registering 139 exceedances of its air permits, state regulators say. Some lasted months. Last year, as the company started building CP2 right next door, its dredging operation released mud and silt into waterways, killing or damaging millions of oysters, according to fishermen and a lawsuit filed by an oyster farm.

Venture Global has faced allegations in legal claims from its Big Oil customers for violating contracts, from former employees for blocking stock option purchases and from environmental groups and fishermen for damaging ecosystems, livelihoods and public health.

Scott Eustis, the community science director for Healthy Gulf, a Louisiana environmental group, said the LNG terminals are accelerating the demise of the state’s coastal communities.

“These are the doomsday machines,” Eustis said. CP1 and CP2, along with a third Venture Global terminal in Plaquemines Parish, are now among Louisiana’s largest new sources of climate pollution. Meanwhile, they were built on some of the most climate-vulnerable land in the country, in the path of frequent storms and no more than a few feet above sea level. And like many Cameron residents, Venture Global is at least partly uninsured against hurricanes—for certain storm risks, the company is not covered by a third party, according to its annual securities filing.

“It really just feels like we really are trading our future away just to backfill holes in the parish budget,” Eustis said.

While it might not seem like it, the LNG business as a whole is a precarious bet. 

With American gas relatively cheap and plentiful, companies have been rushing to build terminals to sell it overseas. After Iran retaliated against the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign by hitting LNG terminals in Qatar, which ranks third in output, the case seemed to grow even stronger. Analysts consider proposed terminals that were once on the fence now more likely to advance because of the bombings.

Yet the war also shows signs of accelerating efforts by many countries to wean themselves off imported fossil fuels. Many analysts say the LNG boom will eventually lead to a glut. Depending on when the glut hits, and how big it is, companies like Venture Global—which has accumulated more than $36 billion in debt to build its terminals—could land in trouble.

For now, Venture Global is seizing on its wartime windfall to finance rapid expansion. Already, the footprints of the company’s two Cameron projects cover about one-fifth of the entire town. One day it hopes to build a CP3.

Yet little of Venture Global’s good fortune is making its way back to Cameron, some residents say. They had hoped the LNG terminals would bring a second wind. Instead, the industrial activity makes some want to leave.

“I hate this place,” Peshoff said recently, sitting in her living room with CP2 framed out the window. “I never dreamed I would feel this way.”

Peshoff grew up next door, on land adjacent to the site, and raised her family here. But as she gazed out at the terminal, a black sequined cap covering her gray hair, she said the company is making Cameron unlivable, adding, “They think they’re safe with that big wall.”

‘Nobody Wants to Buy This‘

Cameron lies at the end of a long, two-lane highway, past wildlife refuges where alligator roadkill line the shoulder, beyond marsh grasses taller than a truck, out at the end where land gives way to the Gulf of Mexico. The cranes are visible long before town, dozens of them sticking into the sky, building the LNG terminal that now dwarfs anything that was there before.

In addition to Venture Global’s two terminals, another company is building a third directly across the Calcasieu Ship Channel, while two more are either operating or under construction farther up the channel.

Apart from oil and gas, fishing is one of the few local industries. Cameron was one of the most productive seafood ports in the nation until 2014, after a fish oil company closed a local processing plant. Generations have plied the waters of the Gulf and the estuarine Calcasieu Lake for shrimp, crabs, finfish and oysters, paying off mortgages and sending children through college.

It was late July last year when Anthony Theriot, a shrimper and oysterman, first noticed mud in the lake. By the first week of August drone footage had confirmed that mud was spilling from a marsh where a contractor for Venture Global had been pumping the material it was dredging from a nearby channel, home to the docks for CP2.

The mud had leaked into Calcasieu Lake, where Theriot and several others had been farming oysters in floating cages. Photographs show the oysters covered in sludge, even though they sit just beneath the surface. Over the next few weeks, the mud killed or ruined millions of oysters worth millions of dollars, according to the oyster farmers and a lawsuit.

On a windy day this spring, Theriot hauled one of the black plastic cages onto his oyster boat to inspect his crop. Theriot is stocky and bald, with gray stubble on his face and tattoos on his arms. His mom grew up in Cameron, he said, and he started working its waters as a teenager.

The first batch Theriot pulled was covered with a thin layer of grime. He opened an oyster and cut its flesh off the shell, revealing black streaks on the pearly surface.

“The sediment is getting inside them,” Theriot said, piercing the streak to reveal mud encased in a thin layer of shell. “Nobody wants to buy this and see that on their plate.”

Another oyster farm on the lake was sued by the restaurant it supplied after it started sending inedible oysters. In response, the oyster farm added Venture Global as a third party, saying that company was responsible. Venture Global has asked to be dismissed from the case.

The farm had 5.2 million oysters in the water as of November, according to a court filing, with “the vast majority” of those harvested since the spill unfit for sale.

“We try to pull our oysters and take a look at them, see if by chance they’re filtering through,” said David Sorrells, who owns the oyster farm involved in the lawsuit. He was speaking from his dock on the lake, where a tank for cleaning oysters sat empty. “The truth is, they’re not. If anything, they’re getting worse.”

Theriot said he had 750,000 oysters before the spill, worth 50 cents each. Only about 300,000 remain, all unfit for sale so far, he said.

While the dredging was technically the project of the Cameron Parish Port, Harbor and Terminal District, the work was paid for and performed by Venture Global.

The company had been warned that its project could leak. On June 10, 2025, the day dredging began, a manager with the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority sent an email to Peter Bell, a vice president at Venture Global, saying his agency had “consistently voiced concerns” in a series of meetings that the project’s design risked spilling the dredge material beyond its boundaries. 

The manager wrote that the company appeared to have an “aggressive schedule” with high pumping rates. He added that his agency “has concerns that these pumping rates and discharge volumes could exacerbate the migration of material into the drainage way.”

Two days later, Bell replied, saying the work would be “closely monitored,” adding that the company wanted to minimize any leaks of material because removing it after the fact “will be challenging.”

The emails were obtained in a public records request and provided to Inside Climate News.

The dredging was halted in early August, after an advocacy group publicized videos showing mud in waterways.

Today, fishermen say sediment from the spill continues to spoil the waters. Site observations in recent months by the Louisiana Department of Conservation and Energy, the state agency overseeing the dredging permit, have continued to find turbid waters next to some ongoing dredging operations related to CP2.

In an email, the department press secretary, Patrick Courreges, said it was requiring Venture Global to restore the area to “pre-spill conditions” by dredging the material that has spilled beyond project boundaries. The company had dredged 33,175 cubic yards as of late May, and the department was reviewing reports submitted by the company to determine whether more work is needed. Courreges said department inspectors had found no evidence of further leaks from the project, which is separate from but adjacent to the ongoing dredging for CP2.

The Cameron Parish Port declined to respond to questions submitted for this article.

Venture Global did not reply to repeated requests for comment, including a list of questions from Inside Climate News, but told other news organizations earlier this year that there were “no significant offsite impacts” from the spill.

Even before the dredging, some fishermen said LNG operations had harmed their work. Theriot told the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in 2024 that he sustained an “unprecedented” decline in his shrimp harvest in 2022 and 2023, the first two years of operation for CP1. His catch was cut nearly in half the first year and dropped another 40 percent the following year, according to his annual catch records.

Eddie Lejuine, who catches drum in the lake, has reported declines too. He’s taken to driving 50 miles to Sabine Lake instead because his catches were so bad, adding four hours of driving on his twice-a-day round trips and more than $100 in additional fuel costs daily.

As fishermen kept coming to Venture Global with problems last year, the company started offering $20,000 settlements that required anyone who accepted to sign away rights to sue the company in the future and prohibited them from disparaging it, according to a copy of a settlement agreement obtained by Inside Climate News.

“I thought it was an insult,” Lejuine said, adding that the company’s operations have slashed his catches and increased his costs for years, with his finances deteriorating along the way.

The Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said shrimp and finfish landings in the Calcasieu Basin were down more than 30 percent last year from the 10-year average, and had been below average the previous two years, too. But shrimp harvests have declined across the Gulf. A federal fisheries report attributed the drop in catches to imports driving down prices, not fewer shrimp in the water.

When asked if the LNG operations are having an impact on fishing, the state Department of Wildlife and Fisheries said, “no trends in the data indicate a need for adjusting management of commercial species in the basin.”

Venture Global is now seeking a permit to discharge wastewater from CP2 into the ship channel and pass that would include stormwater, “miscellaneous non-process wastewaters, commissioning waters, utility waters, backwashes, condensates, building washdown, and equipment washwater.”

Venture Global offered Theriot more than most fishermen because of his investment in the oyster farm, he said. While he declined to share the amount, Theriot said it was far less than what he lost.Theriot is part of a small group of locals speaking out against LNG development, drawing rebukes from some in the community who welcome the influx of workers. Sometimes, the backlash has made him doubt himself, he said. “Am I just a complaining person?” Theriot said from his oyster boat, passing the cranes erecting the giant docks where LNG tankers will fill with fuel from CP2. “Your Facebook posts and everything else, that’s what you hear. ‘Y’all are just complaining all the time.’”

But he feels he has few other options. A small group of landowners are getting rich off development, Theriot said, “but the rest of us are all starving.”

A Global Disruptor

Sabel and Pender launched Venture Global in 2013 with a plan to disrupt the nascent LNG industry.

Competitors were building terminals with a small number of massive “trains,” which cool methane to minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit, making it dense enough to ship like oil. Venture Global would build with smaller trains that could be manufactured offsite and strung together to reach the same output. The arrangement would slash costs and speed construction, the founders asserted.

LNG companies make their money on the “spread,” the gap between U.S. natural gas prices and higher ones in Europe and Asia. As it happened, CP1 shipped its first cargo a week after Russia invaded Ukraine, an event that widened the spread dramatically.

While Venture Global had already committed most of its gas at pre-arranged prices through long-term contracts, the company argued that because of its unique model of powering up a string of smaller trains, it was still commissioning CP1 even as it was able to sell gas. With prices spiking, the company spurned its long-term contracts and sold directly onto spot markets.

Shell, one of its customers, said in a federal filing that Venture Global’s estimated 2023 revenue of $7.6 billion was $4.5 billion higher than it would have been if it had sold to its long-term customers. (All told, Venture Global’s 2023 revenue turned out even higher than that estimate, according to its initial public offering.)

The story continues at Inside Climate News. Click here to read on.