President Donald Trump's administration on Tuesday proposed relaxing mandates meant to block methane leaks from oil and gas wells, part of a broader push to roll back federal regulations designed to tackle climate change.
The Environmental Protection Agency proposal takes aim at requirements forcing energy companies to find and stop methane leaks at new and newly modified oil and gas wells, over industry concerns the mandates are unnecessary and too expensive.
The proposal would lessen the frequency of required inspections to hunt for methane leaks, remove a requirement that professional engineers certify some equipment designs and make it easier for energy companies to deploy emerging technologies to monitor emissions.
The EPA said its changes would save an estimated $484 million in regulatory costs from 2019 to 2025 -- or $75 million annually.
"These commonsense reforms will alleviate unnecessary and duplicative red tape and give the energy sector the regulatory certainty it needs to continue providing affordable and reliable energy to the American people," EPA Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement. "Removing these excessive regulatory burdens will generate roughly $484 million in cost savings and support increased domestic energy production."
The EPA's proposal Tuesday conceded that relaxing the rule -- implemented during President Barack Obama's tenure -- for methane leaks at oil and gas sites would put another 380,000 tons of methane into the atmosphere between 2019 and 2025. The amount is roughly equivalent to more than 30 million tons of carbon dioxide, another fossil-fuel emission that receives far more attention in efforts to slow climate change.
The EPA noted that overall increased pollution as a result of its proposal "may also degrade air quality and adversely affect health and welfare."
Oil industry leaders have said federal regulations are unnecessary in light of ongoing work to keep methane from escaping. Because methane is the primary ingredient in natural gas, energy companies have a financial incentive to keep it bottled up as it moves from the wellhead to compressor stations and into storage tanks.
"Methane emissions from the oil and natural gas industry are already down 14 percent since 1990 while production has increased by 50 percent, said Howard Feldman, senior director of regulatory and scientific affairs at the American Petroleum Institute. "We welcome EPA's efforts to get this right and the proposed changes could ensure that the rule is based on best engineering practices and cost-effective."
The proposal will now be subject to a public comment period, paving the way for final changes next year. The effort dovetails with a separate Interior Department move to ease Obama administration mandates requiring energy companies keep a better lid on natural gas escaping from wells on public land.
Both efforts are part of a broader plan by Trump to roll back Obama's climate legacy. Obama built a three-part strategy for combating climate change, with regulations capping greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, automobiles and oil wells.
Trump's EPA already proposed relaxing carbon dioxide limits for two of those targets in August: power plants and vehicles. Now, with methane, the Trump administration is taking aim at the third and final piece of Obama's 2013 climate action plan.
The oil and gas industry is the leading source of methane, an intense but short-lived greenhouse gas shown to warm the atmosphere 84 times more than carbon dioxide when measured over two decade. That potency increases when measured over a century; methane is estimated to be 25 times more powerful at warming the atmosphere over that 100-year timeline.
Under the EPA's proposal, energy companies would generally have to search for leaks at oil and gas wells annually, instead of twice a year as required under the 2016 rule. Very low-producing sites -- generally known as "marginal" wells -- would have to be inspected once every two years. And the requirements would disappear altogether when major production and processing equipment is removed from any site.
The EPA proposal also opens the door to allowing state mandates to take the place of federal methane requirements. Oil industry leaders say that would be a pragmatic change so companies aren't forced to satisfy layers of duplicative or conflicting requirements. But critics say the change would translate into lax oversight in states with modest requirements.
Although some energy companies have worked aggressively and voluntarily to plug methane leaks, environmentalists and some investors worry the industry as a whole is not moving quickly enough to address the issue. Federal mandates provide essential incentive for companies to spend money capturing methane emissions when the investments won't swiftly pay off, environmentalists argue.
"With this methane safeguard rollback, President Trump's EPA just sacrificed public health and climate for oil and gas industry profits," said Lauren Pagel, policy director at Earthworks. "And he did so despite some of the world's largest oil and gas companies endorsing the need for methane rules."
Information for this article was contributed by Ellen Knickmeyer and Matthew Brown of The Associated Press.
Business on 09/12/2018