The Environmental Protection Agency announced Thursday that it plans to loosen federal rules on methane by allowing oil and gas operators to largely police themselves when it comes to preventing the powerful greenhouse gas from leaking out of new wells, pipelines and other infrastructure.
It also challenges the notion, championed under the Obama administration, that the federal government has the authority to regulate methane without first making a detailed determination that it qualifies as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
If successful, that change could hamper future administrations from enacting tougher restrictions on methane. Already, the Trump administration has taken several steps to limit the government’s ability to regulate other greenhouse gases in the future, including in a recently finalized rule on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.
EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler said in a statement Thursday that the latest proposal removes “unnecessary and duplicative” regulatory burdens. “The Trump administration recognizes that methane is valuable, and the industry has an incentive to minimize leaks and maximize its use.”
The move is the latest in a series of Trump administration actions aimed at undoing previous efforts to combat climate change in the interest of unburdening companies from regulation and reducing their costs. Thursday’s proposal, like some others before it, faced mixed reaction from the oil and gas industries meant to benefit from it.
BP President Susan Dio said in a statement that the EPA should regulate methane emissions. “It’s not only the right thing to do for the environment, there is also a clear business case for doing this,” she said. “The more gas we keep in our pipes and equipment, the more we can provide to the market — and the faster we can all move toward a lower-carbon future.”
Smaller operators, however, had lobbied the administration to lift the requirements. Lee Fuller, a vice president at the Independent Petroleum Association of America, said in an interview that the Obama rule had “made it really onerous on small businesses.”
Methane is a significant contributor to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. It is 80 times as potent as carbon dioxide, though it doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere, nor is it emitted on the same scale.
Scientists have projected that the world needs to cut its overall greenhouse gas emissions nearly in half by mid-century to avert catastrophic effects from global warming. According to the EPA, methane accounted for more than 10 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from human activities as recently as 2017. Nearly a third of those emissions were generated by the natural gas and petroleum industry.