Trump eliminates important methane rule, even if leaks get worse

WASHINGTON – The Trump administration on Thursday formally weakened a major regulation on climate change – effectively freeing oil and gas companies from the need to detect and repair methane leaks – even as new research shows that much more of the potential glass gas in the WASHINGTON atmosphere sucks than previously known.

The rollback of the last great climate rule of the Obama era is a gift to many beleaguered oil and gas companies, who have seen profits plummet from the Covid-19 pandemic. But it comes as scientists say the need to clean up methane leaks at fossil fuel sources has become much more urgent nationwide, and new research indicates that the scale of methane pollution could drive the planet faster after a climate crisis than expected.

Andrew Wheeler, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, announced at an event in Pittsburgh on Thursday that he had completed the legal process of lifting the methane regulation. He spoke in a city at the heart of the nation’s natural gas boom, and in a state that will be critical to winning this fall’s presidential election.

“EPA has worked hard to fulfill President Trump’s promise to cut cumbersome and ineffective regulations for our domestic energy sector,” he said. “Regulatory burdens placed by the Obama-Biden administration have weighed heavily on small and medium-sized energy companies.”

The EPA estimates that changes to the rule will provide economic benefits of about $ 100 million a year by 2030, while leading to the release of about 850,000 tons of planetary heat methane into the atmosphere over the same period.

Mr Wheeler justified the move by citing EPA data which shows that leaks from domestic oil and gas wells have remained stable over the past decades, even as oil and gas production boomed.

However, many recent studies show the opposite: that methane emissions from wells in the United States are much more widespread than the official EPA figures. Overall, methane levels are actually rising nationally, according to the study, and have reached record highs worldwide in part due to leaks from fossil fuel production.

“In recent years, there has been an explosion of new research on this, and the literature has accumulated – 80 percent of papers show that methane from oil and gas leaks is two to three times higher than the estimate of the EPA, “said Robert Howarth, an earth systems scientist at Cornell University, who last year published a study that estimated that North American gas production was responsible for about a third of the global increase in methane emissions in recent decades. .

“It’s crazy to roll back this rule,” said Drs. Howarth. “Twenty-five percent of the human warming caused in the past 20 years is due to methane. Methane is going up. We need it to go down. ”

Scientists say the new data on rising levels of methane means that, even if the governments of the world were somehow able to achieve the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change – in which each nation agreed to reduce their carbon dioxide pollution – these achievements could be obliterated by the heat-capturing power of all the previously undetermined methane in the atmosphere.

Although the effectiveness of the Paris Pact is implied, because Mr. Trump has the United States back him. But environmentalists are hoping it could be restored if Joseph R. Biden Jr. wins the presidential election this fall and the United States rejoins the agreement.

“The Paris Agreement did not take into account the new increase in methane concentrations,” said Peter Raymond, a Yale ecologist who co-authored a study published in July and concluded that global levels of methane have increased. to height.

“Because methane is so powerful, this rise could offset many of the goals in the Paris Agreement,” he said. This could intensify many of the already baked effects over a full term of a warming planet, such as extended droughts, deadly heat waves, stronger hurricanes and more devastating coastal floods.

Methane comes from various sources in addition to energy production, including digestion of animals and landfills, and it hangs in the atmosphere for less time than carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, which comes from burning fossil fuels. But methane has 80 times the power for heating in its first 20 years in the atmosphere.

In recent years, the United States has cemented its place as one of the world’s largest producers of oil and natural gas, a result of the fracking boom. However, a shortage of pipelines, combined with low prices for natural gas caused by the abundant supply, has meant that there is less financial incentive to prevent drilling leaks.

During his administration, President Barack Obama sought to use executive power to combat climate change with a suite of EPA regulations targeting three major sources of farm-heating pollution: target emissions of carbon dioxide from cars and coal-fired energy plants, and methane leaks from wells. At the time, the methane rule was seen as somewhat less consistent than the other two rules, tackling cars and coal plants, in part because data showed significantly lower levels of methane in the atmosphere than of carbon dioxide.

President Trump rolled back the coal plant pollution rule last year, and this spring he significantly weakened the car pollution rule.

But now that Mr. Trump is the definitive turn of his unraveling of Mr. Obama ran, scientists say, that the importance of purification in methane has become much greater because the data has piled up, indicating the scale of the leaks.

According to the EPA’s annual inventory of greenhouse gas emissions, oil and gas resources emit approximately 7 million tons of heating gas annually between 2014 and 2018. However, recent studies show that the actual number is up to twice that .

A scientific study published last month found that the United States fossil fuel industry emitted about 13 million tons of methane in 2017, the equivalent of a year’s heat – capturing value of carbon dioxide pollution from all of the nation’s coal-burning energy plants. A 2018 study in the journal Science also concluded that, in 2015, the U.S. oil and gas industry leaks about 13 million tons of methane annually.

“In many oil and gas fields, we find that emissions are significantly higher than what EPA says they are,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University earth scientist who co-authored the July study. Methane emissions, he said, are “not stabilizing. They certainly do not go down.”

Several scientists said that the main reason for the difference between their studies and the EPA numbers was the thoroughness of the methods used to detect methane. To compile its annual inventory of methane emissions, the EPA requires a mix of self-reported data from companies themselves, and some on-site testing of wells, pipes and other equipment.

The scientists said such tests are not comprehensive. In recent years, academic scientists have begun to use new technologies and techniques to make methane leaks more responsible for drilling rigs and pipelines, such as airplanes and cars equipped with atmospheric monitors and infrared cameras, such as satellites.

“There are blind spots in EPA testing – they miss all these sources of leaks,” said Ramón Alvarez, lead author of the 2018 paper and an atmospheric chemist at the Environmental Defense Fund. a lawyer group.

An EPA spokesman James Hewitt disputed that claim. EPA’s final methane rule is based on the most accurate and comprehensive accounting of our nation’s greenhouse gas emission profile, which is carried out by agency scientists based on data from a variety of sources, including the greenhouse gas inventory of “The agency, the greenhouse gas reporting program, new research, and comments on the proposal. We stand by our figures and analysis,” he said.

The oil and gas industry itself is divided over the rollback of methane regulations.

Large companies such as Exxon, Shell and BP had urged the Trump administration to keep the controls in place. Those companies have invested millions of dollars to promote natural gas as a cleaner option than coal in the nation’s power plants, because natural gas produces about half as much carbon dioxide when burned. They are worried that unlimited leaks of methane could undermine that marketing message and hurt demand.

But smaller, independent oil companies support the rule as a measure of relief as many have difficulty staying afloat. These companies also state that existing EPA regulations still require them to regulate a separate but related category of gases, volatile organic compounds, and that these pavement judges have the side benefit of preventing some methane emissions.

“This has not changed the regulations – we will still have the same requirements” for all new wells drilled in the future, said Lee Fuller, vice president at the Independent Petroleum Producers of America, which represents smaller oil companies and gas companies.

But lifting the methane rule avoids a much stricter future obligation on small oil and gas companies: If the rule remained in place, it could eventually force companies to repair and refurbish thousands of older existing bubbles – a far more costly undertaking.

It is this demand that is frightening small oil and gas farmers, Mr Fuller said. “Forcing it to adapt to existing wells is too expensive. It would bring them out of business. ‘

That may be true, some scientists have said. But they also say that many of those small, older wells can probably be sources of the large amount of harmful emissions.

“This rule helps smaller oil and gas companies, those working on the edge of financial viability,” said Dr. Jackson, a Stanford scientist. ‘But it also says that science does not matter. It prioritizes high economic gains in the short term over economic health and human health in the longer term. ”