Since my trip to Europe was a big part of our work in October, I wanted to write up a travel journal so that people can see what our work is like.
I planned to head to Italy on October 15th to do OGI work and finish up a Welcome Foundation funded film when I received a request to come to Ireland for two screenings of the film Gaslit. I tacked the Ireland trip onto the front end of the Italy trip meaning I spent half of October in Europe.
Ireland October 11-15, 2026
The Irish group FutureProof Clare had two screenings of the Greenpeace film Gaslit, featuring Jane Fonda, planned in conjunction with their campaign Stop Shannon LNG. I would meet up with my friends James Hiatt, For A Better Bayou and Andy Gheorghiu, transatlantic coordinator and a new friend Alexandra Buüehler from Rügen, an island in Germany with a FSRU (floating) LNG regasification plant.
I learned that Gas Networks Ireland (GNI), Ireland’s state owned infrastructure company “that builds, operates, and maintains Ireland’s national gas infrastructure” and a registered lobby group, is pushing to build a floating FSRU LNG regasification plant in the Ennis Estuary in County Clare, Ireland. The GNI lobbyists are busy assuring the Irish people that the plan is to use the regasification plant rarely and only as a strategic reserve for energy security. I also learned that Ireland is covered with data centers that are using about 23% of the energy from the grid, and just like in the U.S., these data centers are building their own gas-fired power plants.
The story unfolding in Ireland is a familiar one. The gas industry pushes for an infrastructure buildout, the FSRU, that requires more pipelines and other infrastructure. Then, they use that investment as a lever to pressure for more expansion that locks Ireland into a gas infested future. Next, they will try to overturn Ireland’s fracking ban because why import expensive LNG when there are cheap gas reserves in the homeland.
Unlike, in the U.S. where climate change is “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, many Irish people and government officials still care about the climate, so this push for more gas has been accompanied by an intense greenwashing campaign.
The Irish people kept mentioning clean New Mexico gas. It was all about importing New Mexico gas, not U.S. LNG. It turns out the New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham, who is steeped in oil and gas money despite presenting as a Democrat, visited Ireland and hung out with the GNI lobbyist. She lobbied Ireland on the importance of importing New Mexico gas which as the myth goes is cleaner than Texas gas.
There are some problems with that story. Firstly, the Permian Basin stretches across Texas and New Mexico and all the gas is commingled into the same pipeline network. It is impossible to segregate the New Mexico gas from the Texas gas. This problem is well known in the EU and has led to significant changes to the way it regulates gas imports.
Secondly, the claim that New Mexico’s environmental regulations have led to cleaner gas production than Texas gas is based on a misleading study. While the findings of the study were advertised as evidence of significant improvements in New Mexico’s emissions, the data underlying the study, which relied on monitoring data from EDF, concluded that New Mexico’s emissions had been declining before the regulations went into effect and reductions had actually slowed after the state’s methane regulations went into effect. Further, EDF’s data indicated that emissions intensities are more than 1% in the New Mexico Permian Basin (more than 5 times industry goals). The focus on intensity also obscures the true climate impacts of New Mexico’s oil and gas production. Since production is going up, intensities can decline even if gross emissions are stable or increasing, and EDF’s data has indicated that gross emissions are not declining in New Mexico.
I did what I could to tell people about how dirty New Mexico’s gas is , but Ireland also needed to see the invisible pollution from its own so-called “clean gas” operations. We decided to squeeze in quick visits to Irish gas plants and hopefully an operating data center between the Gaslit screenings, community meetings, and meetings with politicians. 
Our first stop was the Tynagh Power Plant, nestled in the rolling hills of County Galway. Currently the facility has one stack and our Teledyne FLIR G620 optical gas imaging camera revealed the emission of invisible hydrocarbons (including uncombusted methane), volatile organic compounds and possibly some particulate matter from the stack. Our camera does not detect the CO2, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and nitrogen oxide that are created when methane gas is combusted for energy. The plant has plans to expand.
Near the power plant, we found a farmhouse with solar panels on the roof. In the OGI video you will see the farmer’s barking dog, Tynagh’s stack behind his house, the solar panels on his roof and the horses in his pasture. The only pollution is coming from the gas-fired power plant.
We next visited some data centers in Dublin. Most of them were still under construction so the supplemental gas-fired power plants were not in operation. Some were massive with so many stacks that will create massive pollution when they are operating. Only the off-grid Pure Data Center with three power turbines was operating and only one of the turbines was running when we were there. The low hanging clouds made it impossible to capture the extent of the plume
On the 14th, the day before I left Ireland, we surveyed the Huntstown Power plant. Oof! I have OGI evidence from gas-fired power plants across the U.S., the U.K. and Japan. Huntstown may be the worst polluting gas-fired power plant I’ve seen.
Italy October 15-21
I arrived in Bologna and met Louis Holis, the videographer who is working on a film about my work for the Welcome Foundation. We drove to the commune of Vezzano Ligure in the province of La Spezia. There I stayed in a charming apartment nestled into the side of the mountain. It required many hairpin turns up the mountain. It felt like a car chase scene in an Italian movie I saw once.
The next day we drove to the Port of La Spezia and met with Vittorio Gasparini, a local activist. We took a sailboat from the port to survey the Panigaglia Regasification Plant. Unfortunately, the plant was not operating while we were there. Since I was only in that area for one day, this was crushing for me, but I guess I’ll have to make a return visit.
Around sunset, we observed the Sun Princess Cruise Ship leaving the harbour. The Sun Princess runs on LNG and has a maximum guest capacity of 5189 and crew capacity of 1600. They claim that running on LNG is actually a good thing:
“This fuel is also considered among the cleanest fossil fuels because it can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and almost totally avoids other air emissions and particulate matter.”
The only reason they can make that claim is because the emissions are invisible. A study from Cornell found that using LNG is 33% worse than coal over 20-years.
The emissions from the Sun Princess are similar to a gas-fired power plant.
Here’s a photo of the sunset they missed while watching TV on a giant pollution ship.
The next day we had a community meeting in La Spezia to talk about what we saw and strategies going forward. I met a local engineer wrote a technical paper for a local lawyer who handles issues with ships in the port. This is the English version.
The next day we went to Piombino to film a floating LNG FSRU regasification plant. When we first arrived, the weather conditions were not ideal due to moisture in the air which made the videos grainy. We were met with about a dozen local folks. Their concerns were pollution from the ship’s water discharge which contains sodium hypochlorite used to kill any organisms in the ship’s intake of sea water. There is a fish farm very near the FSRU. In the video I recorded, the water surrounding the ship is hot. They are also concerned about an explosion either from a mistake or sabotage. They claim an explosion would be equivalent of five atomic bombs. Air pollution is another concern as there were emissions from what appears to be combustion of LNG. The ship was only supposed to be in Piombino for three years which has passed and it’s still there.
The industrial area of Rosignano Solvay including the ENEL power plant was our next stop. Multi-family housing surrounds the area. A security guard promptly arrived and told us that we could not film the plant from the public parking lot. We did not push back because the emissions were already causing us headaches and sore throats. We found a better spot.
Near where we parked, there was a canal that carried contaminated water from the Solvay Group soda plant to the ocean. The water is bright turquoise and the beach sand is bright white; it is unnatural and creepy. Besides calcium carbonate testing has detected hydrogen peroxide polyethylene, calcium chloride, sodium bicarbonate, mercury and hydrochloric acid. While we were there, several parents brought their children and dogs for a swim. It is one of the 15 most polluted beaches in Italy.
After that, Louis dropped a local activist named Giuseppe Patti and me at a train station and we headed to Rome where we met with Stephanie Brancaforte, Sara Palliccia, Fabio Rotondo who were representing the environmental group, Rinascimento Green. I walked about 10 miles around Rome and then rested. The next day was October 20, and we had meetings in Parliament and the Senate all day.
We had meetings all day and I won’t list out everyone we met with. Everywhere we went people knew Giuseppe. He is a lowkey celebrity in Italy. We met with Elly Schlein, the most powerful Democrat in Italy and likely the next Prime Minister. We also met with Senator Antonio Nicita. All the meetings resulted in a meeting in the Chamber of Deputies. The English summary of the meeting.
The work with these fantastic groups is ongoing. Europe is waking up to the dangers of being tied to natural gas. Tomorrow morning I will attend virtually a panel after a screening of the movie Gaslit in Galway.
