A New York firm headed by a native Philadelphian aims to build a $6.4 billion liquefied natural gas export terminal in Chester City or another waterfront location near Philadelphia, capitalizing on the abundance of Pennsylvania shale gas and soaring worldwide demand for LNG after Russian’s invasion of Ukraine.

Penn LNG, which is affiliated with a company called Penn America Energy, has been quietly lining up support for the massive project, and it has targeted a 60-acre waterfront site in Chester now occupied by a warehouse complex. Chester Mayor Thaddeus Kirkland said his financially stressed city, which is under state receivership, would welcome the tax revenue and job opportunities from a big industrial development.

Regional labor leaders, eager to create more construction jobs, also have been rallying political support to build a gas liquefaction plant and export terminal along the Delaware, similar to facilities that have sprouted on the U.S. Gulf Coast and turned the United States into a major natural gas exporter. There are only two East Coast LNG export facilities, the larger of which, in Cove Point, Md., is comparable to the facility Penn LNG proposes.

“This has been in discussion quietly behind the scenes over the last five years,” said Jim Snell, business manager of Steamfitters Local 420, which has 4,600 members in southeastern Pennsylvania. “Then the crisis started in the Ukraine, and now I think pressure has just ramped up tenfold. This project needs to get finished.”

LNG projects have attracted strong opposition from environmentalists and community advocates, who say such plants are big polluters, pose a safety risk, and commit the nation to more harmful gas production from hydraulic fracturing when it should be moving away from fossil fuel consumption.

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A big cheerleader for LNG expansion is Toby Rice, chief executive of EQT Corp., the Pittsburgh company that has become the nation’s largest gas producer. Mr. Rice last Monday hosted a delegation of diplomats from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas for a bus tour of EQT’s operations in Western Pennsylvania to pitch the benefits of American LNG.

As part of its campaign to accelerate exports, the US LNG Association is presenting an alternative environmental narrative that portrays natural gas as compatible with aims to reduce worldwide carbon emissions. The trade group, which operates as LNG Allies, says that domestic natural gas played a bigger role than renewable energy in reducing the nation’s carbon emissions in the last decade by displacing dirtier fossil fuels such as coal and oil. It says LNG exports can induce more overseas power producers to switch from coal to natural gas, reducing carbon emissions.