Energy
EPA Pushes Methane Rule Despite Not Knowing Much About The Industry
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The head of America’s top environmental regulatory agency admitted at a convention last week regulators have limited knowledge of the very industry they are trying to regulate.
“My caveat is that EPA’s learning this industry right now because it’s not an industry we regulate,” Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Gina McCarthy told audience members at the CERA Week conference Feb. 26.
She added: “We’ve just gotten into regulation of this so there’s a lot of hundreds of thousands of small sources and EPA doesn’t generally have a relationship with this industry as we do other sectors that we’ve regulated for frankly decades. But we’re learning.”
The new regulation seeks to curb emissions of methane from oil drilling on public land.
The Aliso Canyon methane leak is the largest in U.S. history, according to studies conducted by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of California–Davis.
“I think most people would agree that we should be using our nation’s natural gas to power our economy — not wasting it by venting and flaring it into the atmosphere,” Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell said in a statement.
She added: “We need to modernize decades-old standards to reflect existing technologies so that we can cut down on harmful methane emissions and use this captured natural gas to generate power and provide a return to taxpayers, tribes and states for this public resource.”
Despite the angst surrounding the issue, methane emissions have fallen 73 percent since 2011, according to the EPA’s own data.
“Reported methane emissions from petroleum and natural gas systems sector have decreased by 12 percent since 2011, with the largest reductions coming from hydraulically fractured natural gas wells, which have decreased by 73 percent during that period,” the EPA stated in September.
The reduction in emissions may not be good enough for EPA’s high standards, as the agency is still looking to ratchet down emissions further. “EPA expects to see further emission reductions as the agency’s 2012 standards for the oil and gas industry become fully implemented,” the EPA said.
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