WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama’s administration on Friday announced a strategy to start cutting emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas released by landfills, cattle and leaks during oil and natural-gas production.
The methane strategy is the latest step in a series of White House actions aimed at addressing climate change without legislation from Congress.
Individually, most of the steps will not be enough to drastically reduce the United States’ contribution to global warming. But the Obama administration hopes that collectively they will build political support for more substantive domestic actions while signaling to other countries that the United States is serious about tackling global warming.
In a 2009 United Nations climate-change accord, Obama pledged that by 2020the United States would lower its greenhouse-gas emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels.
“This methane strategy is one component, one set of actions to get there,” Dan Utech, the president’s special assistant for energy and climate change, said Friday.
Environmental advocates have long urged the Obama administration to target methane emissions.
Most of the planet-warming greenhouse-gas pollution in the United States comes from carbon dioxide, which is produced by burning coal, oil and natural gas. Methane accounts for just 9 percent of the nation’s greenhouse-gas pollution - but the gas is more than 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so even small amounts of it can have a big effect on future global warming.
And methane emissions are projected to increase in the United States, as the nation enjoys a boom in oil and natural-gas production thanks to breakthroughs in hydraulic-fracturing technology. A study published in the journal Science last month found that methane is leaking from oil and natural-gas drilling sites and pipelines at rates 50 percent higher than previously thought.
As he works to tackle climate change, Obama has generally supported the natural-gas production boom, because natural gas, when burned for electricity, produces just half the greenhouse-gas pollution of coal-fired electricity.
Environmental groups such as the Sierra Club have campaigned against the boom in natural-gas production, warning that it could lead to dangerous new levels of methane pollution, thus undercutting the climate benefits of gas. The oil and gas industry has resisted pushes to regulate methane leaks from oil and gas production, saying it could slow down production.
A White House official said Friday that this spring, the Environmental Protection Agency would assess several potentially significant sources of methane and other emissions from the oil and gas sector, and that by this fall the EPA “will determine how best to pursue further methane reductions from these sources.” If the EPA decides to develop additional regulations, it will complete those regulations by the end of 2016.
Among the steps the administration announced Friday to address methane pollution:
The Interior Department will propose updated standards to reduce venting and flaring of methane from oil and gas production on public lands.
In April, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management will begin to gather public comment on the development of a program for the capture and sale of methane produced by coal mines on lands leased by the federal government.
This summer, the EPA will propose updated standards to reduce methane from new landfills and take public comment on whether to update standards for existing landfills.
In June, the Agriculture Department, the Energy Department and the EPA will jointly release a “biogas road map” aimed at accelerating the adoption of methane digesters, machines that reduce methane emissions from cattle, to cut dairy-sector greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020.
Advocates of climate action generally praised the plan.
“Cutting methane emissions will be especially critical to climate protection as the U.S. develops its huge shale gas reserves, gaining the full greenhouse gas benefit from the switch away from coal,” said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate change aide under President Bill Clinton, now with the German Marshall Fund.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 03/29/2014