Oil and gas companies would face looser controls on emissions of potent climate-changing methane gas under a proposal expected from the Trump administration as soon as Thursday, oil industry and environmental groups say. The government's plan would ease requirements on oil and gas sites to monitor for methane leaks and plug them.
The Environmental Protection Agency's move would be the latest in a series by the administration easing Obama-era emissions controls on the oil, gas and coal industries, including from methane leaks. Some in the oil and gas industry have urged the Trump administration not to rollback certain environmental regulations.
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The oil and gas industry is the nation's primary source of methane emissions, according to the EPA, accounting for nearly one-third in 2016.
Talking to the Wall Street Journal, acting assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Air and Radiation Anne Idsal said, “The purpose of this rule is to get to the fundamental basis of whether [methane] should have been regulated in the first place. It’s not about whether we’re doing the maximum we can or should do to deal with [climate change]. I don’t see that there’s going to be some big climate concern here."
Methane is a component of natural gas that's frequently wasted through leaks or intentional releases during drilling operations. The gas is considered a more potent contributor to climate change than carbon dioxide, although it occurs in smaller volumes. Around 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions come from methane.
A study by the Environmental Defense Fund , an advocacy group, concluded that the oil and gas industry was emitting far more of the heat-trapping gas than is reported to the EPA.
Besides the greenhouse side effects of the leaked methane, there's also the waste to consider. The International Energy Agency estimates industry can reduce its worldwide emissions by 75 percent—and that up to two-thirds of those reductions can be realized at zero net cost.
While natural gas has long been touted as a cleaner burning alternative to coal, the leakage issues inside the industry are twice as large as previously believed, and could represent a far bigger prroblem than the actual extraction of the fossil fuel.
And, as Kathryn McKain, an atmospheric scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Earth System Research Laboratory says, "These emissions are small, but they're preventable."
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
