(By Alton Wallace/The Center Square) – Liquefied natural gas exporter Venture Global has announced plans to build a 10-gigawatt off-grid power network to supply artificial intelligence data centers that would be located on land the company owns near its terminals in Plaquemines and Cameron parishes.

The company said Thursday it signed agreements with GE Vernova and Baker Hughes to buy 16 natural gas turbines for use in a private network. Capable of producing up to 11.5 gigawatts of electricity, the private grid would be capable of powering about 8.5 million homes, nearly 10 times the peak summer demand of New Orleans.

Operating entirely “behind-the-meter” in “Island Mode,” Venture Global’s private network is to rely on the company’s own natural gas supplies to generate power while a closed-loop water system will be used to cool the data centers, the company said in a release. The data centers will place no demand or extra costs on local public utilities, according to Venture Global.

Building a private network allows companies to bypass the typical five- to seven-year wait for an interconnection to the Louisiana grid and even longer in many other states.

Venture Global CEO Mike Sabel noted the company’s existing 4.5-gigawatt private grid is already one of the largest of its kind in the world. “Over the last decade,” said Sabel, “Venture Global has successfully built complex energy infrastructure, including one of the world’s largest private industrial electric grids that supports our core LNG export business.”

The company’s Plaquemines facility sits on 630 acres along the Mississippi River, while its Cameron Parish export plant occupies a 1,582-acre tract along the Calcasieu Ship Channel, providing space to site data centers. Sabel said the turbine purchases allow Venture Global to expand “power capacity available for new compute as and when we elect.”

“By providing Island-Mode power generation, gas supply, closed-loop water systems, thousands of acres of land, data centers, and other necessary infrastructure, Venture Global is creating a vertically integrated AI utility that could solve for the many chokepoints associated with the AI buildout,” Sabel said.

Venture Global expects to place the first purchase order for a power island by the end of 2026 with deliveries for all 16 turbines anticipated by the end of 2034.

In a related matter, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued a final order Thursday allowing full commercial operations to begin for the first phase of Venture Global’s Plaquemines facility, with the plant’s capacity now at 13.3 million tons per year. Once all phases are fully commissioned, the facility could produce up to 58 million tons of LNG annually.

Total LNG exports at the company’s Plaquemines and Calcasieu facilities are expected to grow from 39.6 million tons per year to more than 100 million tons per year after all planned expansions are completed, which the company anticipates in 2031.

Venture Global’s planned private network is rivaled in scale by the 10-gigawatt, $33.3 billion PORTS-Pike Technology Campus in Piketon, Ohio, previously recognized as the largest data center development cluster under development globally. While the Ohio mega-campus is expected to provide up to 9.2 gigawatts of co-located gas-fired power generation, it is a public-private partnership built on remediated federal land that will interconnect with public utility grids to reach the full 10-gigawatt operational capacity.

In a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Venture Global estimated it will invest approximately $17.2 billion in the off-grid AI network in Louisiana.

In early 2024, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality finalized a $245,000 civil penalty in a settlement with Venture Global Calcasieu Pass LLC and TransCameron Pipeline LLC over nearly 200 air permit violations. State regulators cited the company for unauthorized releases of hazardous air pollutants that include benzene and formaldehyde between 2022 and 2024.

Robyn Thigpen, a Calcasieu resident and executive director of Fishermen Involved in Sustaining Our Heritage, said in a statement emailed to The Center Square that families like hers who have worked on the waters in Calcasieu and Cameron parishes for generations are watching their livelihoods disappear “under the weight of industrial expansion, pollution, dredging, and coastal destruction.”

“Now Venture Global wants to burn potentially 1.9 billion cubic feet of gas daily to power massive AI infrastructure on Louisiana’s vulnerable, overburdened coastline while operating outside traditional utility oversight? This is not progress,” said Thigpen. “This is the industrial sacrifice of our communities being forced on us as ‘progress.’”

FISH will demand rigorous environmental review, cumulative emissions analysis and meaningful public participation, Thigpen wrote.

“Louisiana’s fishermen and coastal residents have paid the ultimate price repeatedly, we are done with being lied to and sold out by our leaders. We are not going to be silenced, we will continue to demand that the regulatory agencies, our government, and multi-billion-dollar corporations be held accountable for their failures to protect ‘We The People’ and our environment,” wrote Thigpen.